Troubleshooting

Troubleshooting Most problems encountered in food production can be traced back to specific causes. Leatherhead's expertise, gained over many years dealing with customers enquiries and problems, can be used to provide our clients with cost-effective, responsive, and reliable troubleshooting and crisis management solutions available around the clock.

The results from such investigations often point directly to the cause of the fault and identify potential routes for overcoming the problem. The advantage of using Leatherhead is that any analytical results are supplemented with an in-depth knowledge of ingredients, products and processing.

Whether developing new products, using new ingredients or simply manufacturing a well-established product with a standard production process, technical problems can arise with no obvious cause. These can be very expensive for the manufacturer, leading to ingredient wastage, loss of production time and frustrated customers.

Microstructure

Often the cause of the problem is the formation of a sub-standard microstructure, which itself may be related to the ingredients, processing or storage conditions. In many cases the first step in analysing a problem product is an initial investigation of the microstructure using light microscopy. This may give some valuable clues regarding the route cause or lead to more detailed investigations using a wider range of physico-chemical techniques such as particle size analysis and rheology.

Another useful technique is to deliberately cause the defect to occur through inappropriate storage conditions such as elevated temperature and intense light. Following storage the microstructure can be analysed as described above.

Taints

At Leatherhead we can deploy both chemistry and sensory analysis to help identify the sources of taints, with sensory analysis helping to identify a range of potential compounds that can be targeted for chemical analysis. Gas Chromatography - Mass Spectrometry (GC/MS) - is employed as it is one of the most selective techniques available for the analysis of volatile organic compounds.

Leatherhead has recently purchased a GC/MS Time-of-Flight (GC/MS-TOF) instrument with Solids Probe and trap thermal desorption, which provides top-of-the-range equipment for the analysis of taints, flavours, headspace volatiles and foreign bodies. 

Download a whitepaper on Troubleshooting Taints

Foreign bodies

Contamination by foreign bodies requires both thorough and rapid investigation.  Leatherhead has considerable experience in delivering timely and detailed analysis to identify a wide range of foreign bodies to help our customers understand the sources and causes of contamination.

Techniques include: 

We can help identify materials including glass, plastics, metals, hairs and fibres, minerals, hazes and certain pharmaceutical products (tablets).

Click here to complete the form to submit a sample for foreign-body analysis.

Leatherhead Food Research is UKAS-accredited.


To learn more about our troubleshooting support, please contact Dr Wayne Morley.

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