Riverside Natural Foods Ltd manufactures healthy snacks at its 20,000 square foot, allergen-free production facility in Concord, Ontario.The Canadian company explains how installing seven x-ray inspection systems is helping it keep up with the soaring demand for its MadeGood brand of granola bars and bite-sized snacks by providing contamination detection and quality controls.
The MadeGood brand has enjoyed remarkable market success since its development and launch in 2014. As well as retailing across Canada, approximately half of the brand's output is exported to diverse overseas markets, including Japan, Australia, Chile, Holland, the UK, Dubai, Singapore and Hong Kong.
On top of this, air Canada recently added the MadeGood Granola Minis to its on-board menu selection, and a leading organic foods retailer is preparing to roll out the brand nationally in the US, with MadeGood products set to appear in more than 370 stores.
Around 150,000 granola bars are produced every week at the company's BRC (British Retail Consortium) certified facility, ranging in size from 24g to 50g, as well as 100,000 packs of mini snacks as this video shows.
X-ray Inspection Ensures Snacks are Safe for Consumption
To guarantee the utmost safety and quality of all its products, Riverside Natural Foods made the decision to invest in seven Mettler-Toledo Safeline X33 x-ray systems as vice president of operations Justin Fluit explains, "Food safety is a major CCP (critical control point) for us, and these systems are invaluable in terms of detecting foreign materials.
"They have been a key part of our business right since we started and can pick up things like fruit pits and nut shell fragments that conventional metal detectors couldn't detect, which provides us with a real peace of mind.
"We believe x-ray inspection is the best way to safeguard the reputation of our brand and we're delighted with our X33s, not only are they very reliable and highly accurate, they're also very versatile and allow us to interchange products easily."
In addition to providing automatic detection and rejection of glass, metal, mineral stone, calcified bone and high-density plastics and rubber, the company also uses the x-ray systems for the dual purpose of checkweighing packages to verify weight accuracy.
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