Boston Sword & Tuna Protects Seafood Safety with Mettler-Toledo Metal Detectors

Boston Sword & Tuna (BST), a seafood distributor, has been delivering fish and shellfish to customers across the United States since the 1970s. With roots in Sicilian fishing traditions, the family-run business operates out of a 50,000-square-foot facility where it processes a variety of fresh and frozen seafood. To help ensure final product quality, BST installed Profile Advantage metal detectors from Mettler-Toledo on all three of its packaging lines.

“Inspecting seafood is particularly difficult for most metal detectors,” said Phil Tripoli, maintenance manager at BST. “Saltwater and ice put out a magnetic field that can confuse run-of-the-mill systems, so we needed something high-tech that could reliably identify metal contaminants without triggering false rejects. Mettler-Toledo is well regarded in the seafood industry, and their Profile Advantage is a great fit for our needs.”

BST installed its first Profile Advantage in 2020 and added two more in 2023 on its other packaging lines. BST’s metal detectors are equipped with a large aperture to inspect 10-pound corrugated cases of fresh and frozen products including cod, salmon, haddock, crab, swordfish, scallops and shellfish.

To better inspect challenging products like seafood and minimize false rejects, Profile Advantage metal detectors use multi-simultaneous frequencies to distinguish between metal contaminants and natural product characteristics. BST’s quality assurance protocol includes twice-daily calibration tests using certified test strips made from ferrous, non-ferrous and stainless-steel metals.

“Our new inspection systems deliver great detection sensitivity, which is imperative given how frequently metal objects turn up in wild caught seafood,” said Tripoli. “Plus, these metal detectors are consistent. They stay within our required specifications during long production cycles without any adjustments.”

Profile Advantage can store up to 100 different recipes for fast recall during changeovers, while the product clustering capability allows similar products to share the same settings. For brand-new products, the single-pass auto-setup routine identifies the optimal parameters in seconds, said Mettler-Toledo.

If metal is detected, the Profile Advantage’s conveyor automatically stops so the package can be removed from the line for further inspection.

“Any flagged cases undergo reinspection through one of our other metal detectors to confirm the finding,” said Tripoli. “Fortunately, re-runs are very rare, and the few we’ve had prove the accuracy of these systems.

“As we continue to expand our operations and serve more customers across the country, maintaining the highest food safety standards remains our top priority. Our Profile Advantage systems give us confidence that we’re protecting consumers and help us deliver the outstanding product quality that has defined our company for generations.”