Are you using appropriate food-contact safe ties and tags in your production facility?

The accurate identification and traceability of equipment and production batches within industry is as important to the foodstuffs and pharmaceutical industries as any other. Nylon cable ties, polypropylene seals, paper tags and industrial labels and tape are commonplace across manufacturing and processing industries in order to convey information, protect or warn against dangers, carry production data, and for many other purposes.

However, for the foodstuffs and pharmaceutical industry, the risk of contamination caused by such products is also of concern for the associated risk to all of us as consumers. Risks fall into two broad categories: products made from inappropriate materials, or from the risk of such products being destroyed and incorporated into finished product batches.

Unfortunately, products such as plastic ties and tags purchased by buyers for identification purposes may be manufactured from material which is not safe to be in direct contact with foodstuffs ingested by humans. Alternatively, it is possible that such tags may become detached from their fixing, and become shredded or otherwise destroyed by production processes, resulting in potential undetectable fragments which might find their way into finished products, contaminating them.

Both of these threats should be a major concern for the industry as a whole, and are threats which should be protected against. This is reflected in US and EU law which prescribes materials which are approved for use within safety-critical industries (for example, see regulation 2023/2006/EC on good manufacturing practice (GMP) for materials and articles intended to come into contact with food). FDA and EU Food Contact Approval regulations set out the standards which manufactured products coming into contact with foodstuffs must adhere to, including the migration limits.

In order to minimise risks and to achieve compliance with all of the legislation, BRC standards and implemented HACCP systems (Hazard and Critical Control Points), production facilitites should use appropriate industrial tags incorporated into the production process. It is very important that such facilities use tags and ties which are manufactured from food-contact approved material, and which are also metal detectable.

Metal detectability is a key way of tracing possible contaminants: our food-safe products contain a metal additive or metal component, meaning that even small parts can be detected by industrial metal detection systems during production quality control checks. For example, our plain and printed detectable cable ties contain a metal additive dispersed through the entire tie, meaning that even small fragments can be picked up by most conventional detector systems, and appropriate action taken.

Universeal has three main product ranges which will assist you in achieving compliance: detectable cable ties – available plain or printed for identification purposes; detectable loop tags for batch traceability; and detectable ID tags, which can be written on to record all many of important production information.

Detectable and food-safe products are a key protection against the threats described here, and should be considered by all food and pharmaceutical producers as an important avenue to minimise the risk of hazards to human health.

If you have any questions at all on our product range, please give us a call or email us.