US-based Oakshire Mushroom Farm uses Mettler-Toledo Safeline’s Signature Touch to maximize food safety and final product quality of its Oakshire and Dole mushrooms.
“Before purchasing our first metal detectors, we went to trade shows and considered four different suppliers. Mettler-Toledo Safeline stood out, so we bought three of their systems,” said Stephen Anania, director of operations.
“Last year, we needed another one and decided to stay with Mettler-Toledo because of the great equipment reliability and customer service.”
“Our sales rep, Dick DeNenno from Reliant Packaging Systems, guided us through the purchase process and helped us identify the best system for our current and future needs.”
“Installation was so easy, we did it ourselves. Just put it in place, level it and plug it in,” said Steven Lathe, maintenance manager.
“Mushrooms are grown in wooden beds held together with nails and screws, so metal detection is a crucial part of our process,” explained Lathe.
“It’s extremely important that none of that metal gets mixed in with the product and goes out the door.”
Safeline metal detectors find ferrous and non-ferrous tramp metal, as well as the most difficult to detect non-magnetic stainless steel fragments and non-spherical fine wire fragments.
With high frequency advanced coil technology and dynamic filtering techniques, these systems maximize detection sensitivity and stability.
“We check the performance of our metal detectors every hour by running test strips through,” added quality control manager Mike Morrison.
“The sensitivity on the Signature Touch is the best we’ve ever seen.”
“Mushrooms can challenge detection technology with their changing moisture content and density, which vary from batch to batch as well as from one mushroom type and size to another,” noted Lathe.
“Our new metal detector works equally well for all our mushrooms and handles most product variations without requiring adjustments.”
Oakshire processes a variety of mushroom types, with changeovers occurring as often as four times per line per shift, depending on the season.
The aperture on the Signature Touch at Oakshire is unusually large, allowing it to accommodate a wide assortment of package sizes.
With an opening 20 inches wide and nine inches high, it can inspect lugs of incoming product as well as the final product quality of retail-sized tills and 10-lb. bulk packages for foodservice customers.
