Automatic Testing in the Bag at Frozen Fries Factory

Fortress Technology’s automatic testing solution has been deployed by one of the largest international suppliers of frozen retail, wholesale, and food-service potato products, ensuring the ultimate product integrity and premium quality from farm-to-freezer-to-table.

One of Fortress Technology’s longest-standing customers has installed more than two dozen of the firm’s highly sensitive Stealth metal detectors. Each is equipped with customized reject conveyors and Halo Automatic Testing.

Producing everything from French fries to hash browns and onion rings, alongside scales, shakers, vibrators, graders, baggers, open bag detectors, case packers, sortation conveyors, palletizers and wrappers, located towards the end of multiple processing lines are several highly-sensitive stealth metal detectors. Each provides a final and robust quality check.

Every hour, each metal detector automatically performs up to nine machine validation tests – equating to 180 or more repeatable tests on multiple SKUs and different-sized bags of French fries, ranging from 225 grams to 9 kilograms. The deployment of Halo Automatic Testing ensures tests are not skipped. The solution also helps to minimize bags of frozen fries being split open to insert test wands, and consequently, good product being damaged and wasted. Additional engineering safeguards also ensure quarantined metal-contaminated products are not re-introduced to the upstream processing line.

Testing the performance of conveyor metal detectors is typically done manually. However, the challenge for an operation of this scale is dedicating the resources and time to conform to multiple QC testing criteria set by suppliers and switching between multiple product SKUs. Especially on high-speed processing lines operating at 150ppm with a frozen product range comprising multiple smaller consumer-sized bags to restaurant-sized bulk-packaged bags of French fries.

Simulating real production conditions, Halo enables the frozen fries processor to program and conform to every customer’s performance verification testing program. Including independently testing all three metals in the leading, trailing, and middle of product bags – a request stipulated by a fast food chain.

‘Product effect’ was the main rationale for these additional checks. The reason is that in bulky frozen products weighing up to nine kilograms, performing just one test could result in high levels of false rejects. This not only distorts results but could lead to potentially high volumes of good product being wasted.

“Testing all three metals in three positions ensures the metal samples are not being masked by the product in any position and also confirms that the reject system is tracking correctly. This is especially important in frozen bulk products when the characteristics might change due to slight thawing during the inspection phase,” Fortress Europe’s Commercial Manager, Jodie Curry, concluded.