Food, the necessity of life, has huge total production output and consumption amount. However, rapid developing of food industry is followed by various problems relating to food safety. Generally, food safety refers to that the activities including planting, cultivating, processing, packing, storing, transporting, distributing, and consuming of food shall comply with national mandatory standards and regulations, and no poisonous and hazardous substances that may cause death of consumer or harm descendant of consumer shall be contained in the food. Food safety has a wide coverage, from producing safety to operation safety, from current safety to future safety, and from packed food safety to packaging material safety. It is necessary to highlight the importance of packaging to food safety, besides food itself.
CONVEN provides professional packaging safety solution for food companies from the perspective of food packaging.
Gas leaking, becoming flat of package and leakage of packed content are common food packaging problems. The first two may cause air to transmit into the package, especially the vacuum package, and produce severe affect to packed content, or even have the packed content become deteriorated. The last refers to the leaking out of liquid or semi-liquid packed content such as sauce and mud juice.
All these problems are caused by leaking problem of package. There are two types of gas leaking: ambient gas transmits into package such as the vacuum package, and gas inside the package diffuses out of package such as the gas-inflated package. Packed content leakage can occur at the sealing area or surface of package. Following are possible reasons for gas leaking of package.
1) Poor barrier property. For example, poor gas resistance of packaging material may cause the gas transmit into or out from the package containing packed content in long term storage.
2) Poor seal performance. For example, seal performance may be poor due to improper heat seal, causing the gas or packed content to leak out, or package to become flat.
3) Low physical and mechanical performance. For example, if packaging material is low in flexibility and puncture resistance to packed content, or low in flex resistance and compression resistance, there may be pinholes or crease appeared on package during storage or transport, even the package may break. If such problems are not discovered in time, the packed content or gas may leak out, or the package may become flat.
CONVEN provides a complete packaging safety solution. From the quality control of purchased packaging material, CONVEN helps to select suppliers and improve packing processing techniques, aiming to prevent leaking out of gas and packed content, or becoming flat of package due to packaging quality problems. The solution consists of:
1) Barrier property of food package. For example, oxygen transmission rate test and nitrogen transmission rate test can be used to determine whether barrier property of packaging material meets the requirements of packed content.
2) Seal performance of food package. For example, by conducting seal and leak test, and burst pressure test, leaking problem as well as leaking position can be detected in time, if any, and the area of package with low mechanical strength can be positioned. Besides, heat seal strength test can determine whether heat seal strength meets the requirements of packed content, and find out the position where heat sealing is not proper.
3) Physical and mechanical performance. For example, tensile strength and elongation rate at break, puncture resistance, pendulum impact resistance, peel resistance, etc, test of which respectively or in combination can be used to evaluate whether the physical and mechanical performance of package such as flexibility, puncture resistance and flex resistance can meet the requirements of packing and transport.
Through the above mentioned performance tests, quality control of packaging material can be generally achieved, and thus gas and packed content leaking, as well as becoming flat of package due to inferior quality of packaging material can be avoided.
Consisting of high precision intelligent testing instruments developed by Labthink, CONVEN Information System, and complete solutions for testing, diagnosis, quality analysis and quality control, CONVEN is a consulting packaging test service system, and has profound social value in respect of cost saving of plastic flexible packages consuming companies, product quality improving, food and pharmaceuticals safety guaranteeing.
