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BARCODING, LABELLING & PACKAGING FOOD LABEL COMPLIANCE:


DOUBLE CONFIDENCE WITH BELTS & BRACES VERIFICATION PROCESS


With skeleton food safety crews, a leaner post-Brexit quality control workforce and Food Factory Managers wearing multiple technical hats, JentonDimaco director Dr Russ Sion explores how a ‘belts & braces’ approach to label verification can save overtasked technical professionals sinking under the compliance and cost controls pressures.


F 14 SEPTEMBER 2023 | FACTORY&HANDLINGSOLUTIONS


ood factory managers today are carrying the weight of responsibility on their shoulders. Staffing; hygiene; allergens; contaminant detection; inflationary costs; energy price uncertainties;


higher salaries; productivity; waste management; process controls; farm to fork traceability; and of course label compliance. The food production frontier is certainly a very daunting, more stressful and pressurised operational environment for senior technical personnel and factory managers today. Wearing multiple hats and juggling countless


responsibilities, it is enough to make the most organised and cautious senior food factory managers feel overloaded. While adopting a belt and braces approach may appear unfashionably excessive to some, with demands continuing to climb, introducing a robust risk-based automated label verification


strategy can collectively tick multiple conformity and compliance boxes in one go. Eager not to get caught baring their


compliance undergarments and the brunt of any ensuing finger-pointing Emergency Product Withdrawals (EPWs), food factory production managers are recognising the swift rewards of automating label verification processes.


FACT OVER FABLE Parading a seemingly robust manual quality control process or smart camera label checking solution can be much like the ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ folktale. A factory may catch the occasional mis-labelled product. Yet, this reliance on human sensory testing – how ever good it might appear - still leaves food processing sites unwittingly exposed and can promote a false façade and sense of compliance complacency. For an industry that’ is awash with productivity


A camera verification system set up to verify ‘Feb 30’, will not identify any issue with pack dates until it is too late. Credit: iStock Madmaxer


buzzwords and procedural hype, there remain multiple interpretations of good manufacturing practice. While having a manual label inspection process is clearly better than none, it is open to falsifications and human error. Not to mention the challenge of resourcing and allocating several responsible and fully trained technical team members dedicated to this repeatable task for an estimated of 30 per cent of every shift. Additionally, what may suffice when inspecting small batches, certainly does not stand up to retailer scrutiny in mass-production food environments where each line can be inspecting in excess of 150 packs per minute. “The notion that manual label checks is a sustainable process in this day and age is no more than a foolhardy proclamation. The label inspection results are also subjective. Even the most carefully documented inspections, are limited to random checks, and certainly cannot spot any embedded label errors.


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