instore - November 2017 - com - 6

Food Safety:

Labeling-based food
recalls
by Andy Nelson

hen most people hear about a
food recall, the first thing that
comes to mind is foodborne illness - listeria, salmonella and E. coli
being the usual suspects.

But many recalls are the result of food
mislabeling, in particular the failure to
disclose food allergens. In September
alone, three U.S. companies recalled grocery deli or bakery products because of
undeclared allergens. And even if no one

gets sick, every recall has the potential to
inflict major damage on a company's bottom line. An Ernst and Young survey of
manufacturers showed that 47 percent estimate the total cost in both sales and direct costs of recall to be $30 to 39 million.
Eight out of ten respondents described
the overall financial consequences of a recall as "significant" or "catastrophic."
Failure to disclose allergens is one of the
biggest mislabeling problems in the food

industry, says Joanna Mooberry, market
segment manager for Aurora, Illinoisbased Mettler Toledo CI-Vision, a division
of Columbus, Ohio-based Mettler Toledo.
"Forty percent of product recalls involve
allergens," Mooberry says. "It's a high
number. Mislabeling is really a big issue."
It can be particularly tricky, Mooberry
says, when a product contains more than
one label. A product containing multiple
units, for instance, often has an ingredients label on the outside packaging
and one on each individual unit. Craft
manufacturers also are more exposed to
labeling errors if they need to frequently
change labels by hand as product changes, she says. "They have a lot of product
changeovers because they want to maximize the time they have their production
up. It creates a lot of issues." Product
changeovers, she says, typically need to
be executed as quickly as possible. That
means operators must often scramble to
refill or change labels, raising the risks of
mistakes occurring.
Another problem is equipment malfunction, which is slightly less common than
human error, but no less disastrous,
according to a Mettler Toledo white
paper. Printers perform multiple runs
of the same label design as manufacturers need them, which creates the risk
of slight variations in each individual
run. The slightest printer error can prevent important information from being
included on a label. "For example, a
printer may run low on ink, resulting in
a missing allergy warning," according to
Mettler Toledo.
Mettler Toledo CI-Vision makes vision
inspection systems that examine labels
for errors and help ensure that labels
match the contents of their products,
Mooberry says. The "100% uptime" the
computerized system provides is a big
improvement over checks by a human
being, she says. Manual inspection can't
keep up with production line speeds of
1000 parts per minute or more, yet some
manufacturers still only rely on manual
inspection to protect themselves from
product defects such as label mix-up.

FORTY PERCENT OF FOOD PRODUCT RECALLS INVOLVE ALLERGENS.
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6 * NOVEMBER 2017

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One recent upgrade to the system, Mooberry says, is the ability to detect errors
in ink jet print, which is notoriously dif-

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