The Monitor

In the dairy industry, it’s critical to safeguard product quality and safety, while maintaining proper custody transfers of milk and milk products. Automatic sampling is an important part of ensuring that each dairy manufacturer is providing true representation and adhering to product quality and safety standards.

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Topics: Food & Beverage, Solids & Powder, Liquid & Slurry

Roasting and combining coffee beans into distinctive blends can be challenging. Each type of bean in the blend needs to be carefully roasted to ensure consistency of color and taste of the final brew. Automatic sampling can help optimize sampling accuracy and repeatability in the coffee blending process, while ensuring a delicious cup every time.

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Topics: Food & Beverage, Solids & Powder

This article originally appeared in the news section of Borrow-Agee Laboratories' website. This testing service blog has been republished here for our readers. 

One of the most important things to consider in order to get accurate test results in food safety testing is your sampling process. Many companies still rely on manually sampling animal feed, byproduct, or animals themselves rather than automated sampling. But this encourages a number of problems that may not allow for the most effective quality testing. 

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Topics: Food & Beverage, Solids & Powder

Extracting and refining seeds, legumes and sometimes the “fruit” into oils, such as olive, avocado and vegetable oils, can be complicated. Processed oils need to be consistent in color and taste, and free of impurities that could negatively affect its quality. Automatic sampling can help optimize sampling accuracy and repeatability in every step of the extraction process, while ensuring a safe and delicious final product.

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Topics: Food & Beverage, Liquid & Slurry

Automatic sampling systems are simple, safe and accurate ways to manage representative sampling in your plant. But even the most reliable sampling solution will need ongoing maintenance and service. When your automatic samplers aren’t functioning properly, these troubleshooting tips can keep your system running smoothly.

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Topics: Cement, Food & Beverage, Mining, Solids & Powder

Ensuring that animals’ food is safe and meets federal regulations is critical to the animals that consume it, the people who care for those animals and the brand image of the manufacturers. Automatic representative sampling of animal food helps ensure quality and safety for both people and pets.

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Topics: Food & Beverage, Solids & Powder

All food and beverages undergo some form of processing, and those processes need to follow a variety of local, national and international food safety regulations. Buying certified samplers from authorized sellers is critical to ensuring your plant has the right sampling equipment to meet these standards and keep our food supply safe.

Yet many plants purchase sampling equipment outside manufacturers’ authorized distribution channels – also known as the grey market. According to the Harvard Business Review, an estimated $7 billion to $10 billion worth of products are sold every year in the United States outside these authorized channels. Most consumers and businesses buy items on the grey market because prices are generally lower.

But investing in these unauthorized products doesn’t give you the same peace of mind as those with genuine ones, and it could bring you back to square one both financially and in terms of inspection violations.

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Topics: Food & Beverage, Solids & Powder, Liquid & Slurry

Read Part I in this series to learn about the importance and impact of representative sampling.

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Recent recalls of flour contaminated with salmonella and E. Coli have placed an increased focus on pathogen detection at milling operations.

Flour is considered a raw food product, since most flour products don’t undergo a heat treatment or kill process like ready-to-eat foods. Contaminated flour can make people sick if they eat under-cooked or uncooked flour-based foods, such as cookie dough or cake, muffin and bread mixes. 

It’s essential to implement a sampling process that provides a statistically significant sample for pathogen testing so you can quickly and accurately detect any contamination issues.

Whether you’re testing for pathogens or physical properties, samples should be statistically significant and represent the characteristics of the entire lot. The bottom line is that you want to divide an entire lot into small manageable units, then take a number of units regularly from the process. 

The samples should be taken from a place in the process where the material is well-mixed and won’t introduce bias (exclude different-sized particles or kill pathogens that might be present). The number of samples and sample mass collected should be related mathematically to the confidence level that is being targeted – for example, 95% confidence level requiring 60 samples of the lot.

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Topics: Food & Beverage

The CDC estimates that each year in the United States, 48 million people get sick, 12,000 people are hospitalized, and 3,000 people die from food-borne diseases. And recent recalls of flour contaminated with Salmonella and Escherichia Coli (E. Coli) have placed an increase focus on pathogen detection at milling operations as flour is considered a raw food product. 

The Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) and Hazard Analysis and Risk-Based Preventive Controls (HARPC) requires virtually every food manufacturer, processor, packer and storage facility – including millers – to identify hazards in their foods and processes, and implement controls to minimize these hazards.

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Topics: Food & Beverage

In 2016, food recalls surged 22% to 764, with many tied to the dairy industry. Contaminated dairy products can be linked to consumer illness, with the potential to permanently damage a dairy’s brand. How can milk and milk ingredient processors turn the tide, while complying with new and expanding regulations?

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Topics: Food & Beverage