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Any contaminant embedded in a food product gets in the way of quality and safety and causes headaches for manufacturers. In the poultry industry, minute bone fragments pose constant challenges and risks for recalls and even consumer injuries.
Such tiny pieces of calcified bone can be easily overlooked in chicken products bound for human consumption. To help processors prevent such issues and protect their products and brands, Eagle Product Inspection has developed a next-generation detector technology, Performance X-ray Technology (PXT™), that captures more detailed data about a product than previously possible. PXT™ can identify bone fragments down to 1 mm in size in fresh, frozen and refrigerated poultry products as well as in bulk flow and retail poultry portions. When paired with the RMI 400 x-ray machine, the technology has been shown to detect bones as small as 0.6 mm.
Speed is also a hallmark of the new technology. High-resolution product images are processed instantly through the use of Eagle’s latest SimulTask™ PRO image analysis software.
One company that is using this new system to find more bone fragments, including low-calcification bones in young chickens, is Giannone Poultry. The processor recently deployed Eagle’s RMI 400 with PXT™ machine in its 250,000-square foot facility, after determining that a new deboning process was resulting in the inadvertent contamination of bone fragments in meat. “The Eagle x-ray machine has resulted in a dramatic reduction of bones in our boneless products—basically down to zero. By purchasing a dual-lane system, we’re able to double our output, or run different products at the same time,” reports Bruno Giannone, vice president and chief executive officer at Giannone Poultry.
In addition to helping solve problems in the poultry industry, Eagle’s PXT™ detector technologies are now available in several Eagle x-ray machines for general food applications.