Bakery ensures quality in crowded plant with 'hanging' detector

Food & Drug Packaging, Sept, 1998

Brown's Bakery has grown steadily throughout its 125-year history, and this landmark year saw another new 'high.' The company added garlic bread sticks and dinner rolls to its existing sandwich bun line, making it necessary to add an additional metal detector - not an easy task in Brown's already packed historic brick building in Defiance, Ohio.

Dave Graham, president of the bakery and fifth generation Brown's family member, explains, 'Like many in the bakery business, we have good awareness of the need for HACCP [Hazard Analysis Critical Care Points] programs, and we put one in place, managed by one of our production supervisors. At the start of the program, we knew we needed a 100% metal detection system, so getting this equipment installed was one of our first actions.'

Plant engineer Terry Lineman says, 'We discovered that to have the metal detectors perform at their highest sensitivity, we'd have to meet a few machine location requirements. When we put everything together, there was only one place it could go - up.'

By hanging a metal detector system from the rafters, the bakery is able to assure 100% inspection of packaged product. The unit, from Safeline Metal Detection, is fed by a series of conveyors with diversion lanes downstream of the bun oven. All products on the bread stick and roll line pass through the metal detector before being directed to one of Brown's packaging lines.

Secure And Flexible

Brown's bread sticks emerge from a continuous conveyor oven onto a series of cooling conveyors from Sandvik Process Systems which transfer the cooling products to tracks that take them upward to the metal detector, positioned directly above the final packing station. A retractable belt reject mechanism lets rejected product fall into a suspended clear plastic box where production supervisors see it immediately and examine it for the source of contamination. Two U-turns downstream, buns are sliced, wrapped, racked and then moved to palletizing.

The microprocessor-based metal detectors feature access code protection that prevents unauthorized adjustments to sensitivity control. Authorized operators access detector programs through a membrane keypad, allowing adjustment for product changeover. A Supervisor code permits complete adjustment of set-up parameters such as sensitivity product compensation and reject delay timings. The Engineer's code allows access to all technical parameters, including switchable amplitude/narrow zone detection.

Up to 21 different product set-ups can be preprogrammed and stored in memory for easy product changeover. Automatic setup allows new products to be set up for inspection automatically by simply passing several product samples through the detector. Once adjusted for optimum performance, the settings are held in memory for future recall.

'We expanded our production lines in 1997,' says Graham, 'but we wanted to meet our 100% metal detection goals by adding only one new detector - and a hanging one at that. We checked out the Safeline equipment and two other companies. We asked for recommendations from other bakery engineers and we investigated the maintenance potential before making our final choice. The conveyor detector from Safeline has done the job superbly, and keeps our expanded lines running.'

Saves Material and Product Waste

The real push for a metal detector and other HACCP changes came with the recent addition of frozen garlic bread products. These products catapulted Brown's outside its usual local distribution patterns to ship as far away as Florida.

Garlic products, including bread sticks and Grandma Emilie's Garlic Bread, have boosted Brown's profits in the past two years. These products, shipped frozen to a wide distribution area east of the Mississippi, have pushed the plant to a consistent three-shift-a-day production much of the year. With such highly used equipment, each new product Brown's adds to its line presents a new manufacturing challenge.

For example: Brown's Bakery was one of the first to put its garlic bread into metallized oriented polypropylene (OPP) films. Initially, they were concerned that products wrapped in these films might present a problem for the detectors because of the metallized nature of the film.

Ernest Lopshire, vice president of production, explains, 'A few months ago, we thought we might have a metal contamination problem in a batch of already-wrapped garlic bread. Safeline helped us troubleshoot the situation over the phone, so we didn't have to unwrap everything and waste product. We were able to reset the bread line metal detectors and run this product through the detectors still in its metallized OPP package. It saved lots of material and eliminated the need to destroy finished product.'

For more information from Safeline Metal Detection, call (800) 447-4439. For information from Sandvik Process Systems, call (973) 790-1600.