Test Equipment and Measurement Instrument Blog

The end of the fiscal year for many companies is approaching and, with that, questions arise as to what your business could be doing to benefit your bottom line.

R&D, quality control and quality analysis department laboratories are rife with a variety of spectrometers. These test instruments improve the bottom line of manufacturing companies, ensuring products meet standard market parameters with minimal waste. While a variety of instruments utilize infrared spectroscopy, near- infrared (NIR) spectroscopy is specifically useful in analyzing bulk materials, often with no sample preparation.

NIR test equipment has evolved over the past decade to be used in a wide variety of analysis applications. Currently, these spectrometers are employed across nearly all manufacturing lines, measuring everything from pharmaceuticals to food and beverages, and spanning the chemical, beauty, packaging, coating, medical supply and agricultural industries. Just one spectrometer can be used to confirm the state and quality of bulk materials or raw ingredients, assess intermediate products in a processing line and confirm that final goods are ready to meet consumers’ expectations.

Traditionally, samples are brought to the lab, where these high-tech machines stand ready. However, walking a sample from the field, stockroom or factory line is time-consuming, prohibited to a limited size and shape of the sample, and introduces unwanted variables. In response to these limitations, we’ve designed portable spectrometers, like the KJT130 moisture meter, to meet the real needs of QA, QC and R&D specialists.

Here’s why we believe operations or development teams would be hard pressed to find a better investment.

Discovering new spices and recipes, sampling new foods, and taking home delicious new recipe ideas is all part of the enjoyment of IFT - we should know, we've been doing this for over 15 years.

Innovation is the name of the game at Kett. While we’re ever conscious of the challenge to keep our designs current and top-of-the line, we’ve also been making an effort to keep our company on the edge of today’s market. Thus, we’ve officially joined the social media revolution, starting a Twitter account and a Facebook Page to meet our customers wherever they may be.

Today, farmers, food manufacturers, quality assurance and R&D specialists are all on social media to disseminate information faster than ever before. With this year’s rice harvest coming up, we’ve been following the Twitter hashtags #rice, #crop2013, #ag and #agriculture to monitor real time updates from the USDA, the Institute of Rice Research Institute, the California Rice Commission, and a host of other agricultural information centers around the globe. Keeping up with what interests our customers helps us understand how our products can meet their needs, while following trends informs us about what we need to be designing next.

In this week’s hashtag hunt we learned the Food and Agriculture Resource Center of the United Nations (#UNFAO) issued their April 2013 Rice Market Monitor Report, announcing a 1 million ton uptick in rice yields and an estimated 1.8% increase in global rice utilization for the next year. We also found a study presented on Radio Australia reporting that 70% of the world’s population is now dependent on rice for food. In the hopes of averting monumental crop losses, governments are now initiating long-awaited research and development funding. In lesser news, we also discovered that the first crop circle of the season has been found in a UK oil seed patch! Oh, sorry, got distracted for a moment there.

Well, you’ve got to have some fun on Twitter, but in all seriousness, with the upcoming public release of our C130 powder whiteness tester and the recent debut of both our PQ520 rice moisture meter and our C600 grain whiteness meter, we’re looking forward to contributing our test equipment to help meet the global rice industry’s growing demands. Monitoring the latest industry news has shown us the importance of ensuring our moisture meters and quality measurement instruments are available to this growing market.

While it’s certainly been an adventure to explore new territory in the realm of social media, it’s the human-to-human interactions that really get us excited about what we do. The relationships we’ve formed over the past 25 years at conferences like PittCon and the Institute of Food Technology (IFT) conference have become the heart of Kett. We’re hoping to merge the two worlds and connect to at least a few of the 20,000 professional attending IFT, as we’ll be introducing ourselves and our products under #IFTExpo for the first time this year.

Having started Kett specifically to serve farmers just like the ones posting their first harvest’s photos on Twitter under #rice, we are thrilled to be merging our technology with that of today’s world of communication.

As a supplier of grain quality test equipment, we educate ourselves on the greatest needs in the industry and pass along best practices to our customers.

Quality control (QC), quality assurance (QA), and R&D managers have the responsibility of ensuring that their products meet certain quality standards. Part of this criteria is often moisture content specifications, with management needing to identify accurate moisture content along the manufacturing or the supply chain process.

Let's have a look at standard moisture meters