Looking at filling machines in the food industry, most of them use a scraper in the funnel to ensure a constant flow of the food, e.g. meat or sausage meat. The scraper is usually made of the thermoplastic material TECAFORM AH natural, a food grade acetal that exhibits high stiffness combined with a good wear rate against stainless steel.
In some instances the scraper may get broken if the load is unexpectedly high. Most of the time, as this is a fully automated process, the damage is detected very late. As a result of the plastic contamination in the food, the whole production lot of the current production run has to be disposed of, as it is now damaged food.