With high-impact food safety related events happening frequently, food safety has become the focus of the public and the government. In case involved with food safety problem, a promising food company may break down without redemption. Besides the raw material, additive, and producing technique, packaging is also one factor playing important role in food safety.
CONVEN provides professional packaging safety solution for food companies from the perspective of food packaging.
Oxidization, rancidity and pungent smell of food are common problems. Oxidization may reduce the nutrition value and flavor, or even spoil the food, affecting its edibility and consumer health. Common oxidization includes oil/grease oxidization, yoghourt oxidization, milk oxidization, candy oxidization, etc, in forms of exceeding acid value, rancidity, pungent smell of food, etc.
Most of food contains nutrition such as oil/grease and protein. These types of nutrition may be oxidized when contacting with oxygen, decomposed by microbes, or oxidized under high temperature, and as a result macromolecule acid and peculiar odor will be generated, leading to the exceeding of acid value, rancidity, or even pungent smell. Reasons causing the oxidization of food can be summarized to two types: food itself and package.
1. Food itself. For example, in case the quality of oil/grease used for food processing is low or the storage conditions are not suitable, the food may soon be oxidized and get rancid.
2. When package quality is low, ambient air may transmit into the package, resulting in the oxidization and rancidity of food. Packaging reasons causing above problems may include:
1) Poor barrier property. For example, in case the oxygen resistance of packaging material is low, ambient air may gradually transmit into the package during long term storage, resulting in the oxidization of food gradient. Also, in case high oil/grease content product is packed inside package made of improperly laminated composite films of which the oil/grease resistance is poor, the layers of composite films may tend to separate with each other. As a result, barrier property of the package as a whole will be reduced.
2) Poor seal performance. For example, improper heat seal may produce poor seal performance at the sealing area, and as a result, ambient air may transmit into the package from the sealing area. Besides, package with low boiling and steaming resistance may occur with leaking problem when sterilized in high temperature, weakening its seal performance.
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 in production and storage, 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, food packed inside may contact with large amount of oxygen and get oxidized.
Food factor can be solved by manufacturer and distributor. As to the manufacturer, production process shall be strictly controlled. For example, select high quality raw material and additive. Besides, during storage and logistics, temperature and humidity conditions shall be controlled.
As to the packaging, 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 oxidization, rancidity and pungent smell of food due to packaging quality problems. The solution consists of:
1) Barrier property. For example, oxygen transmission rate test can be used to evaluate whether barrier property of packaging material applied meets the requirements of packed food.
2) Seal performance of food package. Seal performance. 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 requirements of packed food, and find out where the heat sealing is not proper. As to food required to be sterilized in high temperature, steaming and boiling resistance test shall be performed to check whether there is leaking problem after the test.
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. Peel resistance test can be used to determine whether the compound strength of composite film meets the requirements of packed content containing high oil/grease content, and whether barrier property of packaging material would be further reduced.
Through the above mentioned performance tests, quality control of packaging material can be generally achieved, and thus oxidization, rancidity and pungent smell of food 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.
