quality control
Food manufacturers use a system called Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points (HACCP). This helps to identify what could go wrong in the production process (e.g. biological, physical and chemical hazards), and to put in place strict quality control checks called critical control points (CCPs) at key production stages that make sure that the product is safe.
Other checks might not be to do with safety, but are put in place to make sure that the product always has exactly the same appearance, taste, aroma and texture.
Quality control checks might include visual, weight, temperature, microbiological, pH, chemical and metal checks, as well as organoleptic checks (sampling the final product to check its flavour, aroma and texture).
Cadbury’s plants operate 24 hours a day, producing products to the highest standards of quality control.
The Cadbury Dairy Milk Bubbly plant, for example, produced bars with such precision that the tiny air bubbles in the chocolate were within 0.2–0.3 mm of each other.
Factors such as temperature are monitored at about 1,000 points in the plant, feeding information to central computers, which can deal with 360,000 instructions a minute.
