Quality Control example essay topic

12/12/04 Topics in Liberal Arts Math. Quality Control Quality control, as described through the Encarta Dictionary, is a system used in many companies, departments, and businesses for achieving or maintaining a desired level of quality in a manufactured product by inspecting samples and assessing what changes may be needed in the manufacturing process. To do this inspectors are hired and made to look over every step of the manufacturing process to make sure the product is as the company's standards want it to be. There are many businesses that use this technique, but one in particular which hinges its success on the quality of its product is the food industry.

In no other industry is quality control more important than in this field. If the quality is not checked in all products it can spell disaster for a food processing company. Not only can poorly processed food taste bad, but, in some instances it can lead to sickness, leaving the industry in a very difficult and possibly legally responsible situation. So, to prevent this, the food industry, as well as many others, chose to use quality control in the form of sampling, to make sure their products go on the market not only tasting good, but being safe as well. In the food industry, quality control is used to make sure that only the tastiest product goes on the market, and in order to do this, only the best ingredients must be chosen for a company's product. Take for example tomato paste.

The most vital ingredient in tomato paste is just that, tomato. Therefore, a company specializing in tomato paste must first check and guarantee that all the tomato's meet there specifications. The first step in this process would then have to be creating quality specifications. The most popular method amongst the food industry for creating this is checking the food product through what they call "food attributes".

In the case of a tomato this can be anything from color, size, shape, any damage on the tomato, and the hardness of the fruit. Once this is completed and agreed upon, inspectors are hired to overview and test a representative sample of the food, in this case tomatoes, to make sure the batch meets the specifications set out by the company. If the sampling does not meet the requirements the whole batch is usually discarded or used for other purposes. So in this case it becomes easy to see why sampling is such an important part of quality control, because it is the determining phase in deciding whether the product goes into manufacturing or not.

Bibliography

Quality Control in the Food Processing Business: web information service / quality %20 control. pdf.