A novel low-cost contactless capacitive evaluation approach for capping integrity assessment of food and beverage containers

•Novel capacitance-based testing for container capping integrity evaluation.•Contactless detection of uncapped, unscrewed, tilted and leaky container caps.•High speed defect detection (50 ms) suitable for inline integration.•Low detection limit (0.15 cm) for poor capping and leaks (50–75 µL).•Realizable in small footprint for food and beverage FMCG inline integration. Food and beverage (F&B) industries employ containers to package, store and transport ingredients/products. High-speed capping of containers is prone to defective sealing, which affects containment and subsequently causes leaks during transportation/handling. Currently, capping integrity assessment is performed either non-destructively inline using expensive equipment for specific container size (