I feel capitalizing is in order
"bottles of the strange substance" -> "bottles of the Strange Substance"
Soylent, which produces liquid food for techies who hate chewing, has stopped shipping its gloop after some of it was contaminated with mold. The firm started flogging version 2.0 of its formula in August, and has produced 400,000 bottles of the strange substance. It has since learned that 11 of the bottles had mold inside or …
I never take these statements at face value, mainly because the more usual problem is from used condoms in the vacuum-pack machine.
We have "... the conveyor guardrail settings were not optimized ..." which is definitely a new one on me, how is it that the process so easily thwarted by this? Do they not have a bit of plasticised foil stuck to the top before the lid goes on?
Bottles moving erratically on the conveyor is what happens when you haven't set the thing up properly - not "optimised", just "properly". And if it's enough that the liquid actually comes out of the top then this, again, this isn't some tiny tweak to do, it's either overfilling or really rickety.
"... we conducted physical and visual inspections ..." must be a variation on "picked some up and gave them a bit of a shake to see if anything splashed out.
And "We have since optimized the line settings to minimize any recurrence of this issue." surely means either "we found the loose bolt and tightened it" or "we stopped trying to run it faster than the recommended rate".
Bah. Assembly lines have no "properly" to them. You cobble together equipment from several companies and fiddle with the adjustments until it works, more or less. It's not like there are any equations for how to do it.
If you really hit the big time, you can buy a machine vision system to inspect each unit. But that costs the world and entails even more fiddling with adjustments.
> Bah. Assembly lines have no "properly" to them.
Perhaps in the general case, but (assumption alert) this is surely a Well Known Thing, sticking liquid in a bottle and shoving a lid on it - done by numerous places and companies so although there might not be the exact science that 'properly' may imply, there is no shortage of information and examples of how to (not) do it? In any case the problem does look a lot like nobody was paying attention as well as them not bothering with a proper seal, which I'm a bit surprised isn't mandatory for that type of drink.
(confessional disclaimer : have worked on production lines though not food ones, surely can't be that much different, just more handwashing, right...?)
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I have worked on these before Booze, Weed Killer, Pharmaceuticals, and the worst one in particular
cough syrup but none of them sloped over the top of the bottle due to "erratic line movement or erratic movement on the line I think the mould was likely to be caused by poor or non existant cleaning of said line.
Shirley you mean bacon...or is this story from El Regs Western Outpost in which you are partially forgiven for not knowing what the taste of proper bacon is. Please thoroughly read the Articles of Faith, in particular the comments sections. Three times.
I beg to differ, .com equals US if .co.uk = UK (no one here in the states uses .co.us unless they couldn't get a .com address) and for the record the use of a "u" in words like "mould" and "colour" serves absolutely no redeeming purpose whatsoever except to sow discontent from anglophiles and confuse immigrants trying to learn the language. If I remember, those words have a French influence when spelled that way. "Centre" is the same baloney.