About this course
This course covers how physical metal contamination gets into food product — broken equipment parts, worn blades, wire fragments, and similar sources — and how routine metal detector testing and calibration prevent contaminated product from reaching a customer. It's written for both QA and maintenance staff, since keeping a metal detector effective requires both a QA-owned testing schedule and maintenance-owned equipment upkeep.
Metal detection is typically managed as a critical control point or a preventive control within a facility's food safety plan, and routine verification is a standard GMP prerequisite program expectation. Common industry practice is to run test-card or test-wand checks at the start of each production run, at defined intervals during the run (commonly every 30 minutes to two hours depending on the facility's risk assessment and HACCP plan), after any stoppage or maintenance event, and at the end of the run — supplemented by more thorough aperture testing and professional calibration on a periodic (often weekly-to-annual) basis.
This course is designed for QA technicians who perform routine sensitivity checks and for maintenance staff who install, adjust, and service metal detection equipment.
After completing this course, learners will understand how metal contamination typically enters a product stream, know how to perform and document a test-card verification correctly, understand why verification frequency should be based on a documented risk assessment rather than guesswork, and know the corrective action steps required — including product hold and reject-zone inspection — when a detector fails a verification check.
Topics covered
- Common sources of metal contamination in a food facility
- Metal detection as a critical control point / preventive control
- Test-card and aperture verification procedures and frequency
- Maintenance responsibilities: sensitivity adjustment and equipment upkeep
- Corrective actions and product hold when a detector fails verification
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