X-rays ensure chicken fillet quality

The installation of two Ishida X-ray inspection systems at the Rose Poultry factory in Skovsgaard, Denmark, has fully automated the previously manual process of checking chicken fillets for bones.

Rose Poultry is Denmark's largest manufacturer of chicken products and has one of the most advanced poultry processing plants in the world.

With an established reputation for quality, it was natural for the company to seek to further enhance the inspection process on its frozen chicken fillet lines.

Checking for small pieces of bones can be an arduous manual task with health and safety implications owing to the repetitive nature of the work.

The Ishida IX-GA-2475 X-ray machines are able to carry out the operation automatically, detecting the smallest pieces of bone, at speeds of up to 160 fillets per minute.

As a result this has removed five people from each of the two production lines.

The IX-GA X-ray system uses a self-learning Genetic Algorithm (GA) to ensure maximum detection sensitivity and reliability.

The machine can generally detect impurities down to 0.3mm in size and can also spot missing items or damaged products.

In addition, the place of contamination can be accurately pinpointed.

The IX-GA's were selected in preference to two alternative 'bone checker' machines which, according to Rose Poultry factory manager Per Alan Jensen, were more difficult to operate and had to be calibrated each time by the manufacturer.

'The machine is compact, which means it can fit easily into a line in any part of the factory,' he said.

'We were very pleased with the high levels of service we received from Ishida during the installation of the equipment, with engineers coming over from England to help us through the start up period.' Once checked by the Ishida system, any rejected fillets are transferred to a separate conveyor and taken off for inspection and repacking.

'This means that we now only have to manually inspect around 10 per cent of production whereas before we had to check everything,' said Jensen.

The Ishida X-rays can also check for other contaminants such as metal, glass or plastic, and the company is considering using them for other quality inspection requirements elsewhere in the factory.

The company is already the largest user of Ishida multiheads in Denmark, having installed its first weighers some 12 years ago.

Rose Poultry is now in the process of replacing its original weighers with the latest Ishida models.

Two new CW-RS versions have just been purchased to handle frozen chicken legs.

Installed in conjunction with Ishida's Danish agent TH Consult, the weighers have been adapted to take into account the lack of height in the factory.

They feature a specially-designed reject system that allows over weights to be re-circulated for re-weighing before they are transferred into the bagmaker, thereby avoiding wasted packaging materials.

The old Ishida weighers were removed and the new ones installed within 16 hours and with minimal production disruption.

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