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Humanitarian Relief Producer Tackles Full-Case Detection

Edesia turned to x-ray technology to inspect a ready-to-use food that is expected to reach some 2 million malnourished children this year.

UNICEF and USAID challenged Edesia to create an x-ray solution for inspection of the RUF products and that could potentially set the bar for foreign material detection for the industry.
UNICEF and USAID challenged Edesia to create an x-ray solution for inspection of the RUF products and that could potentially set the bar for foreign material detection for the industry.

Edesia is a unique non-profit organization and social enterprise that manufactures specialized ready-to-use therapeutic and supplementary foods (RUFs). The organization was founded in 2009 in a partnership with Nutriset, the French company that pioneered the RUF Plumpy’Nut® in the late 1990s. Edesia’s founder, Navyn Salem, learned that 5 million children were dying every year from malnutrition, something that is preventable if there was simply more access to nutrition.

Today, Edesia’s 3-year-old, state-of- the-art Rhode Island plant manufactures a full line of RUFs designed to treat and prevent childhood malnutrition, namely Plumpy’Nut, Plumpy’Sup™, Plumpy’Doz™, and Enov’Nutributter®. Humanitarian aid workers deliver these products to malnourished children in developing nations around the world. Since the first RUF rolled off Edesia’s production line in 2010, more than 8 million malnourished children in more than 50 countries have been fed with its products.

Plumpy’Nut, the RUF designed to treat the most severe cases of malnutrition, is composed of peanuts, powdered milk, whey, sugar, vegetable oils, vitamins, and minerals.

Packaged in sachet-style film pouches, Plumpy’Nut does not require refrigeration, cooking, or the addition of water—especially critical in areas where these resources are often scarce. A pouch is simply opened, and then a child can eat directly from it. The pouches have a shelf-life of two years.

Inspecting entire cases at once

Given Edesia’s target population of undernourished and immuno-comprised children, food safety is of utmost focus and importance. One key element of this is foreign material detection. Edesia sought out a system that would meet all of its detection goals without slowing down the pace.

Instead of inspecting individual pouches prior to case packing, filled and sealed cases of pouches go through inspection. This is thanks to the Pack 550 PRO with a Hi-Ray 9 x-ray generator by Eagle Product Inspection, which was installed in mid-2018.

When he started his research, Edesia’s Plant Operations Director, Ronald Yanku, did not know of anyone in his sector who had successfully accomplished this before. It was so unusual that it first drew disbelief from the governing bodies that audit RUF packaging lines—UNICEF, the World Food Programme, and USAID. In fact, USAID and UNICEF challenged Edesia to create an x-ray solution for inspection of the RUF products and that could potentially set the bar for foreign material detection for the industry.

“In the past, no RUF producer had been able to prove that you could do this intense of a detection at a full-case level. The product itself is very dense, and when you have 600 in a single case, with the amount of void space between, and the amount of shadows, it’s a difficult task,” Yanku says. “The audit teams said that no one in our industry could do this, no detection system could scan either the 150 large pouches or 600 small pouches, through heavy corrugated cases, and still detect what it needed to detect. We proved to them that we’re able to do that without ever even stopping the cases. Therefore, our packaging line is much more streamlined, and everything goes through a lot more smoothly. In addition, it’s using most of same settings for each of multiple formats, so there aren’t any delays or any human intervention needed.”