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At the Iffa fair the hi-tech eye that finds contaminated meat

Xnext presents the XSpectra system for food quality control

The market for meat-based products worldwide is worth 700 billion euros, equal to 62% of the total fresh food production and 76% if only processed meats are considered. Italy represents the fourth market in Europe for products based on meat processing, after Germany, Spain and France, with volumes of 21.7 billion euros. For an industry of this size it is essential to guarantee the food safety of products and an increasingly transparent supply chain to consumers. For some time now, companies in the sector have been investing to improve the machinery that processes food: out of a total expenditure of 49.9 billion euros, 22.4% concerns machinery for meat. But the inspection systems of food production currently on the market fail to identify many of the contaminants that most frequently can end up inside the meat, such as pieces of bone, cartilage, glass, plastics, rubber.

Xnext, a deep tech company specialized in multi-energy X-ray inspection systems for real-time quality controls in industrial processes, will present the solution it has devised to improve food safety in meat and other food production lines. The result of ten years of research and development and of 15 million euros of investments, XSpectra, the patented technology, is today the real-time on-line inspection system for food products that combines three levels of technological innovation such as photonics, nuclear microelectronics and artificial intelligence. It is able to identify contaminants that are not otherwise detectable today, in particular low-density foreign bodies, such as plastic, non-calcified bones, insects, wood, mud and high density, such as stones, glass, metals.

At the Iffa fair, the company (Hall 9.1, Stand E88) will exhibit three versions of the system, one of which has been specially designed for meat products and recently installed at an important Italian meat producer. This machine has a larger inspection area than the other versions to allow you to analyze bulk products arranged in multiple rows, and is able to detect inside them the presence of contaminants such as bones, cartilages, plastics and rubber. In a few milliseconds it analyzes each product and decides whether or not it conforms to the required quality standards. In addition to meats, XSpectra has already been tested on fruit and vegetable products, sauces, legumes, biscuits, tortellini. Each machine installed on a production line is able to inspect, for example, 2 million tortellini, 6 million packages of biscuits, 36 million of cheeses, per month.

hef - 24137

EFA News - European Food Agency
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