Quality assurance in meat MAP

IN modified atmosphere packaging of meat products, traditional quality control approaches involve manually removing packages at intervals and testing them to ensure that the gas mixture is as it should be. A far better system involves quality assurance, where the gas mixture is monitored constantly during the flushing and packaging process, so any deviation is immediately identified and can be corrected with minimum disruption to the production line.

This saves time and money and typically the cost of the investment in the technology can be recovered within a year, says Karsten Kejlhof, of the MAP quality solutions provider PBI-Dansensor.

"Conventional quality control involved removing a package every so often to check it. If you take out a sample every 15 minutes, you don’t know if the problem might occur just after you have removed the sample, by which time hundreds of packages might have gone through the system before the next sample is checked. Also, three samples every 15 minutes is 12 an hour, two shifts a day for 300 days, creating a lot of waste and repackaging just for testing the samples," Mr Kejlhof points out.

PBI-Dansensor A/S
T: +45 57 66 00 88     E: infor@pbi-dansensor.com
W: www.pbi-dansensor.com
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