Ensuring Product Safety

Quality is a core concern for BEA and the ongoing commitment of the company to improve its quality policy was rewarded by its ISO 9001 certification in 2011 as Technical Director, Mr. Didier Vial explains, "It consolidates the relationship of trust with our customers and partners by ensuring them of our implication to deliver a quality of service."

In a bid to further enhance quality, the company began exploring product inspection solutions in 2014 as Mr. Vial explains, "We manufacture soap for many retailers and our aim is to meet our customers' needs precisely in terms of the shape, colour, size and perfume of the soap, but most important is product safety.

"Our soaps are at risk from two types of contamination; firstly from contaminated raw materials, for example stones from the lavender fields, and secondly from parts of our processing machinery.

"Soap manufacturing is a mechanical process and there's a risk that little parts of blades or screws could end up in products. Metal is the main contaminant; we once found part of a metal spring in a bar of soap, which could have been extremely damaging if it found its way to a customer.

"We decided we couldn't take this risk and at that time, we had no existing inspection equipment in place so we began to conduct some tests with a variety of product inspection systems from a number of different suppliers, not all of the results were acceptable for us until we tested with x-ray inspection equipment."

Outstanding Contaminant Detection

In the company's search for a solution capable of providing unrivalled contaminant detection in its bars of soap, BEA contacted several x-ray system manufacturers, before purchasing Safeline X-ray's X33.

Specifically designed to inspect small to medium-sized packaged products, the X33 utilises new detector technology which allows the integration of a low power (20W) x-ray generator.

The x-ray system provides automatic detection and rejection of glass, metal, mineral stone, calcified bone and high-density plastics and rubber, and is capable of inspecting up to 300 products per minute.