Does the US not practice basic food safety? (answer: no, it doesn’t)
I did some contracting for an NZ food manufacturer and EVERYTHING went through a metal detector after the packaging was sealed. It was regularly tested with a 0.5mm metal ball cast into a brick of some kind of acrylic/epoxy.
The later line had an x-ray too.
But regulations like that would mean a 0.0004% decrease in profits! Are you mad!?!
For a real answer, instead of the usual Internet and “US bad” useless comments… yeah things like metal detectors and X-rays are pretty standard for a lot of food manufacturing.
However, just because things are standard, and even installed and used, that doesn’t guarantee that it issues are noticed immediately. Things do fail, sometimes silently depending on the design, and that might not be noticed immediately, or employees on the line ignore issues instead of dealing with them. Sometimes, things are just caused by laziness or incompetence, not for intentional reasons.
And sometimes it’s just a difference in who’s expected to verify quality at various stages of processing a product. If the final processor and packager isn’t likely to cause a particular issue via their equipment and process, they might not check for those issues, instead expecting their suppliers to do so before they get the material. Like if the final company just puts packages the final product in plastic, they might not be checking for metal fragments because their equipment doesn’t have any risk of doing that. And the previous suppliers might not be checking because they expect the final company to check the end product is after all processing. So the end result is no one actually checked for it.
Anecdotally, I can imagine a situation where a line worker feared for their job if they stopped production to tell their manager about a problem. So they kicked the proverbial can down the road hoping somebody else would deal with it.
You don’t know at all, do you?
???
It’s basic QA.
Bag it, metal detector, check weigher, throw it in a box, send some samples off to QA to swab for bugs and check for seal leaks.
That was bread but I doubt cheese is massively different.
Good & Gather, Great Value, Publix, Sprouts and Happy Farms.
Walmart, Target, and Aldi.
Eh, that’s what you get for buying pre shredded cheese.
