Selection on a broad spectrum: Olga Pawluczyk uses light to take a closer look at food safety

From memories of a special event to mundane moments that makes you smile, every photo tells a story. For Olga Pawluczyk, CEO of P&P Optica (PPO), a picture is more than just a thousand words; it’s a reflection of light with thousands of data points, each with unique colours or wavelengths, telling their own stories. And when she brought this perspective to the food processing world, she began to see nutrition in a whole new light.

A little introspection never hurts

Finding a way to implement spectroscopy was the easy part—it was useful in so many industries. Olga and her team just had to find their niche. Sort through different types of plastics in a recycling facility? Detect bitumen (a substance produced from petroleum) in oil sands? All of these ideas had potential, but nothing quite stuck.

Until she looked down at her dinner plate.

A new lens on life

When Olga tested food under a spectrometer, she immediately saw so much potential. Light reflected off the components, showing distinctly different colours between things like protein and fat. Then it clicked: if Olga could give meat processors a precise percentage of the amount of fat in a cut of meat, for example, she could help them make a better final product. But when she shared her vision with industry experts, the response was lukewarm at best. It needed to have a bigger impact, especially since, “spectrometers could improve consistency, but many processors felt the difference wasn’t worthwhile,” Olga recalls.

So she watched.

And learned.

And found a gap along the production line.

By the time meat is packaged, boxed and placed in delivery trucks, it has travelled across many kilometres of conveyor belts, multiple bins and a number of workers’ hands. At any point in the journey, a foreign object could fall onto the assembly line, resulting in product waste, health and safety recalls and—in the worst cases—a negative impact on consumers.

Of course, there were already many precautions in factories to prevent mishaps, but they had some limitations. The human eye is good at finding visual differences, but certain contaminants blend in with the crowd. X-rays are excellent at detecting dense objects such as rocks or metals but struggle with low-density impurities, like plastic and rubber. With spectrometers, however, Olga and the PPO team could see beyond the limits of the human eye. A tiny piece of cardboard nestled amongst a batch of chicken pieces was no match for their precise spectrometers, as the system would immediately detect the differences.

But spectrometers are delicate, and the equipment in processing facilities needed to withstand the intense cleaning procedures and long shifts. Simply installing spectrometers and using standard cleaning procedures would be like “taking your cell phone, spraying it with high-pressure soapy water, then doing that every day and hoping it survives,” Olga explains. They had to shift their focus from technology to engineering, ensuring that every part on their system could be regularly deep-cleaned without affecting the spectrometer’s ability to accurately detect materials.

It was a tall order but not impossible. After several attempts, tons of feedback from industry partners, and the addition of artificial intelligence, their prototype finally emerged.

Years of hard work and ingenuity led to an imaging system capable of upholding industry standards of cleanliness while keeping the spectrometer safe.

And that was the easy part. The real challenge began in the market.

The test drive

For meat processors, introducing new technology to a sensitive environment required careful consideration. Any change had to simultaneously compliment and improve the pre-existing procedures. Taking a risk on a theoretical product just didn’t make sense. And with PPO only having one prototype available, creating trust in spectroscopy could take years.

Olga and the PPO team needed to get real units into processing plants to show the merits of spectroscopy. But building one was expensive enough. How could they manage more?

After exploring opportunities that could support their vision and receiving grants from programs, including Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s AgriInnovate program, it wasn’t long before Olga and PPO finally had enough funding. They got started right away, building multiple demonstration units to share with potential customers.

With demonstration units on site, processors could conduct tests to gain an in-depth understanding of how PPO’s spectroscopy solution could work within their facilities. It also provided an opportunity to give feedback on specific changes for a more efficient system. “When processors freely share their concerns, we can work through them together,” says Olga. “A lot of our learning happened because we saw that even if the problem was similar across facilities, the solution might look a little different in each place.”

Just two short years later, the team’s imaging systems are already making a difference in many meat processing facilities across North America. Olga and the PPO team also plan to use the data collected from their systems to better understand how processing and storage can improve the final product. Because now that she’s seen the light, Olga and her team are just getting started.

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