Midnight cereal snacks, energy sports bars and on-the-go breakfast replacements are shaping the snacks market with UK consumption expected to reach £3.8bn this year*. Given this increasing demand for healthy convenience, snacks producers are turning to efficiency driven automation and utilising the latest machinery to deliver consumer satisfaction and maintain safe, high quality snacks. Sarah Ketchin, managing director at Fortress Technology explores the varied challenges of inspecting for contaminants and the options available.
To maintain freshness, metalized polypropylene is the snack industry’s standard for packaging. For many manufacturers that deploy metal detectors, ferrous in-foil detectors can be used. Settings can also be adjusted, so foil laminated packaging is rarely an issue for today’s advanced metal detectors. There’s also the alternative of passing product through a metal detection systems before the packaging process commences.
