Traceability is increasingly a ‘must’ for food and beverage manufacturers seeking to provide greater visibility to their customers, consumers and government regulators.

Traceability is more than a buzzword: it’s increasingly a ‘must’ for food and beverage manufacturers seeking to provide greater visibility to their customers, consumers and government regulators.

These groups are demanding both real-time analytics and data and images that can be stored and retrieved at a later time. Technologies are advancing along with the demand for true traceability, including the use of advanced x-ray inspection.

Anticipating the need across many industries for demonstrable traceability, Eagle Product Inspection has refined its technologies to deliver the latest solutions. “There’s no guesswork in today’s advanced x-ray inspection capability. Manufacturers can capture information and images to achieve greater traceability and, increasingly, item-level traceability.” said Steve Dowd, Regional Sales Manager, Eagle Product Inspection.

One example of the ways in which manufacturers can achieve true visibility is through the use of advanced software, such as Eagle’s TraceServer™ software that records valuable production data and machine status information from one or more x-ray machines and consolidates it into a centralised database.

With TraceServer, manufacturers can quickly and easily access inspection statistics, reports and product images that are time and date stamped. “This provides a virtual product snapshot, if there is a question or issue later in the process,” explained Dowd.

Item-level traceability is possible with Eagle’s new Pack 240 HC machine, designed with technology that links inspection data to a unique identifier printed on each item. This unique ID allows for real-time analytics and provides complete information on the product that is inspected.

The Pack 240 HC with item-level traceability software and Eagle’s scalable data logging system for multiple machine connections, TraceServer, will be highlighted as part of a “Traceability Station” displayed at the upcoming IFFA 2019 show, from 4–9 May in Frankfurt am Main, Germany (Hall 9.1, A88).

According to Dowd, interest in the next level of inspection and visibility is high. “The industry is moving toward greater detection capability, and we’ve been seeing an uptick over the past few years, as people look to protect their brands and add different layers to their detection capabilities,” he said.