Product Quality and Safety

Committing to Product Quality and Safety

Our customers, and our customers’ customers, demand products that are high in quality, safe and sustainable—and so do we. That is why we have built an integrated, global manufacturing approach designed to ensure high quality and reduce our impact on the environment.

To underpin our approach, we place great emphasis on forming collaborative relationships with customers and suppliers, offering our team as a resource for technical support, troubleshooting and ongoing consultation to address challenges and resolve issues from the outset. For example:

  • Our technical and process audit programs address seaming, pasteurization, hygiene and can handling to help customers improve safety standards, reduce spoilage and enhance line performance.
  • Our fully equipped pilot facilities let production processes or new product packaging be carefully tested and fine-tuned before launch, saving brand owners both time and money.
  • Our extensive Food Hall enables us to replicate our customers’ filling and processing conditions, streamlining new product development timelines and ensuring food safety.
  • Our Customer Technical Service team is composed of food scientists, design engineers, chemical engineers and microbiologists, giving us a deep understanding of the food and beverage processing and packaging industries. With longstanding expertise across the industry, we can help improve our customers’ processes, evaluate new technologies, optimize solutions and provide guidance on operation and implementation.
Cans

Double Seaming Made Simple

When it comes to food cans, the ability to lock in and preserve the freshness of ingredients, while also keeping out unwanted elements like microorganisms, light and oxygen, is a big advantage. The same is true for the secure containment of internal carbonation and pressure in beverage cans. The double seam, found on virtually all food and beverage cans today, is a simple and proven way to provide a hermetic seal. If not monitored and adequately controlled, inadequate seaming in the customer’s filling locations can lead to wasted materials and costly product recalls.

While the end goal is simple, seaming is the most demanding element of can production and can filling. We offer support in all aspects of the seaming process with a dedicated team of experts. Our team can optimize seamer tooling equipment, provide technical guidance and run comprehensive training programs, which can be tailored to the experience levels of the participants. Classes range from three-day sessions on the basics of seam evaluation and risk analysis to intensive two-week courses that incorporate information on more complex issues such as the assembly and dismantling of seamer equipment. The classes can be tailored to different experience levels.

Finally, our Integra™ intelligent double seaming system helps food and beverage fillers monitor the integrity and quality of seams in real time. This proprietary technology not only detects and ejects poorly seamed cans but also provides trend analyses to identify seamers that are drifting out of specification so that preventive measures can be taken before seam quality deteriorates. As a result, this unique technology facilitates the efficient production of fault-free, quality packaged products for Crown’s customers.

Metal Packaging: Playing a Critical Role in Food Safety

Metal packaging is one of the safest options for food and beverage packaging:

  • High temperature sterilization ensures the purity of food products by protecting against food poisoning caused by microbiological contamination.
  • Coatings maintain the integrity of the package by preventing perforation defects.
  • Cans are impact- and puncture-resistant, making them unbreakable.
  • The format is capable of withstanding extreme pressures and temperatures.
  • Metal provides a complete barrier against light, gas and oxygen, protecting product freshness, flavor and quality as well as enhancing shelf life.

According to the U.S. Food & Drug Administration, there has not been an incident of food-borne illness resulting from a failure of metal packaging in more than 40 years.

Chemicals Management

We proactively examine manufacturing methods and standards—including the use of chemicals and materials—to ensure products meet customer expectations without compromising the wellbeing of consumers, employees and the environment.

While few, if any, of the materials we directly use to manufacture coated metal cans, ends and closures are classified as hazardous, our suppliers inevitably have to use a small number of hazardous substances to formulate the high performance materials essential for the long-term safe storage of food provided by our containers. Using expert risk assessment and management, Crown and our supply chain ensure that any hazards intrinsic to the raw materials do not present a risk from the finished container to consumers. We constantly monitor the status of raw materials so that any emerging concerns can be safely and efficiently dealt with through substitution, re-formulation or refined risk assessment, allowing us to offer customers choice with respect to product performance and substance use.

We manage the materials we use through a comprehensive material database that includes qualification data, key compositional information along with safety data sheets, declarations of compliance and other regulatory compliance statements covering food contact, Classification, Labeling and Packaging (CLP) and environmental requirements. This information allows our risk assessment experts to ensure the safety and compliance of our finished products.

Read our formal chemical policy for food contact which addresses occupational safety, food contact safety and substances of concern here.