Food & Drink Process & Packaging Issue 28 2020 | Page 40

Ishida leaves no stone unturned in coffee bean quality Ishida’s advanced x-ray technology has used Ishida weighing equipment for a enabled one of Slovakia’s leading tea number of years, Baliarne turned to the and coffee suppliers to further enhance company to help solve this problem. its quality and safety standards for the introduction of retail packs of roasted “We knew that Ishida was easy to coffee beans. Since the installation work with, that the company takes a of the Ishida IX-EN-2493 at Baliarne detailed approach to every project and obchodu, a.s. Poprad, the company that if we have an almost impossible says that consumer complaints task, Ishida is the most likely to find resulting from stones in the beans have been eliminated. Residual stones in coffee beans is a common problem. Despite Baliarne’s already rigorous quality control procedures, including using magnetic separators and passing the beans through a de-stoner machine, also damage the blades in domestic grinders and professional grinders for espresso machines if they go undetected. Prior to the installation of the Ishida x-ray inspection system, quality checks for stones were carried out by hand stones can still be present. As well but operators were not able to detect as impacting on the perceived overall all the stones, leading to frequent quality of the coffee, the stones can consumer complaints. Having already 40 FDPP - www.fdpp.co.uk a solution,” explains Peter Paciga, Baliarne’s production director. Initially the IX-EN-2493 was tested on packed product, but the number of bags still containing stones proved to be too great, so the decision was taken to inspect bulk product prior to the bagging of the coffee beans. “From that moment, we have not had any further instances of stones in the beans,” confirms Peter.