As sure as a cup of morning joe, food processors need to conduct representative sampling to gain the insights they need to ensure process control and product quality and safety, and determine product characteristics. Two coffee producers recently purchased different Sentry® samplers specific to their applications to help them meet those needs.

Coffee bean sampling

One customer, a national producer of a well-known coffee brand processed in New Orleans, needed to sample whole roasted coffee beans within a product line to ensure quality and determine roast color classification – light, medium or dark – using analytical electronics that accurately measure color. The first step in gathering data was to obtain a representative sample of the beans from large gravity freefall lines of 10 and 12 inches, at a maximum temperature of 140° F.

A Sentry RX automatic strip sampler with an extended nose best fit this application, as it takes a strip sample of free-flowing materials from drop chutes, bins, hoppers, pipes, or air slides by extending its sampling tube into the process line. While in line, the tube is continually taking sample and simultaneously discharging it to the collection point.

This long-standing customer had used a previous version of the Sentry RX sampler for many years. The newer design of the sampler features a premount adapter at a 90 degree angle, which was ideal to meet the application needs. The customer has purchased and currently is employing more than 20 Sentry RX samplers.

Coffee granule sampling

The second customer, a beverage-brewing system producer based in Vermont, produces more than 400 varieties of popular pre-blended beverage pod inserts, many of them coffee. This newer customer needed to sample ground coffee granules from an eight-inch gravity freefall chute that deposited product into a conical hopper, at a maximum temperature of 120° F.

For this application, the Sentry ISOLOK® SAH automatic point sampler was the best solution. This fixed volume sampler is a smaller solution that collects 18 cc or up to 50 cc of sample volume per cycle of particles up to 5/8 inch (16 mm), ideal for sampling ground coffee for grain size and product quality. Because the hopper is completely filled with coffee, there is no extended nose on the sampler. Instead, the coffee granules fill the hopper and an annulus extends into the chute to capture the sample and then retracts. After purchasing this sampler, and pleased with its performance, this customer recently purchased another one.

Reliable, accurate and repeatable sampling delivers the real-time data that food producers and processors need to make strategic operational decisions with confidence.

Learn more about our sampling solutions for food and beverage markets here.

This article was originally published on our website.