Del Monte Foods, Inc. is one of the largest producers, distributors and marketers of premium quality, branded food products for the U.S. retail market. Del Monte® Foods offers a range of fresh and canned fruit & vegetable products. Their brands include Del Monte®, Contadina®, College Inn®, and S&W®. The company is headquartered in Walnut Creek, California with 8 factories and several co-manufacturing facilities across the country and the globe.

Challenge:

Find the source(s) of contamination in a cream corn line spanning over several pieces of equipment including two pipes, 2-inches wide and over 100-feet long, and a filler bowl with 40-50 filler heads

Solution:

Abiotic marker

Customized 135ft snake inspection camera with onboarded UV-flashlight

Outcome:

Minimal amount of taking apart of pipes, limiting line downtime

Validation / Rejection of contamination source hypothesis

Adaptation of cleaning protocol based on the results

Derrick Bautista
Director of Quality Assurance, Del Monte Foods

“It’s always very hard to try to just do swabbing and then backtrack where it is coming from. With this abiotic marker, we are seeing where the product hang-up is and where areas of difficult cleaning can occur”