Tag Archives: maintenance

Food processing and sanitation

Safety in the Details: Maintenance Practices That Make or Break Compliance

By Ainsley Lawrence
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Food processing and sanitation

Food production facilities constantly face scrutiny from regulatory bodies and consumers. While you might focus on visible sanitation protocols and equipment upkeep, subtle facility issues often remain undetected until they become critical compliance problems. Hard water deposits gradually compromise cleaning effectiveness, while hidden mold growth can quietly contaminate products despite thorough surface cleaning.

What seems like minor maintenance concerns can quickly become major regulatory violations, production shutdowns, and compromised food safety. When you recognize early warning signs of water quality issues and environmental contamination, you can address problems before they affect production or trigger compliance failures.

Water Quality and Its Impact on Food Safety

Water functions as both an ingredient and a cleaning agent throughout your food production facility. You might overlook how water composition affects everything from equipment performance to final product quality. Minerals in hard water create scale buildup inside pipes, valves, and machinery, reducing operational efficiency and creating ideal environments for bacterial growth in hard-to-clean crevices.

Scale accumulation on heating elements forces your equipment to work harder, shortening operational lifespans and increasing maintenance costs. Even more worrisome, mineral deposits can interfere with cleaning agents, reducing their effectiveness and potentially leaving surfaces inadequately sanitized despite proper chemical usage and cleaning protocols.

Food processing areas face particular challenges when hard water diminishes sanitizer effectiveness. Chemical reactions between minerals and cleaning agents can neutralize active compounds, leaving surfaces appearing clean while failing to meet microbial reduction standards. You might only discover resulting food safety risks during laboratory testing or regulatory inspections.

Selecting appropriate water treatment systems requires understanding your facility’s water quality challenges. Industrial water softeners protect critical equipment while ensuring cleaning chemicals perform at optimal levels. Softened water reduces chemical usage, improves cleaning efficacy, and helps maintain consistent product quality across production batches.

Mold Risks in Food Production Facilities

Mold contamination presents a persistent threat in your food production environment, yet early signs often remain unnoticed until problems escalate. Vigilant monitoring helps you prevent widespread contamination issues before they affect products or trigger regulatory concerns.

You should establish routine inspection protocols focusing on areas prone to moisture accumulation. Pay particular attention to loading docks, ceiling tiles near HVAC vents, wall joints, and drainage systems as common mold growth sites. Persistent musty odors often indicate hidden problems, even when visible mold remains absent. Train your staff to report such odors immediately so you can trigger thorough inspections of surrounding areas.

Visible water staining on walls, ceilings, and floors indicates current or past moisture issues requiring immediate investigation. Discolorations may appear minor but often signal more extensive problems behind surfaces. Humidity fluctuations, particularly in processing areas generating steam or requiring frequent cleaning, create ideal conditions for mold proliferation.

When you discover visible mold, implement immediate containment measures to prevent spore distribution throughout your facility. Signs you need professional mold remediation include recurring moisture issues, discovery of mold covering surfaces larger than 10 square feet, or mold in HVAC systems. Professional assessment determines contamination extent and appropriate removal methods to prevent cross-contamination during remediation.

Moisture control strategies provide long-term protection against mold development. Proper ventilation, strategic equipment placement to reduce condensation, and prompt repair of water leaks create environments less conducive to mold growth. Regular air quality testing complements your visual inspections by detecting elevated spore counts before visible growth appears.

Regulatory Compliance and Maintenance

Food safety regulations require comprehensive preventive controls addressing both known and potential hazards. Your maintenance programs are vital, meeting regulatory requirements by preventing physical, chemical, and biological contamination risks from facility infrastructure and equipment.

Regulatory inspections increasingly focus on maintenance documentation and implementation rather than written programs alone. Inspectors evaluate whether your maintenance practices effectively prevent contamination by examining repair records, preventive maintenance schedules, and corrective action documentation.

You benefit from integrating maintenance teams into food safety committees to ensure regulatory requirements inform maintenance priorities. Such collaboration helps your maintenance personnel understand how their work directly impacts compliance and product safety, encouraging more thorough documentation and follow-through on preventive measures.

Adding preventive maintenance takes thorough scheduling and verification:

  1. Catalog all equipment and facility components requiring regular maintenance.
  2. Document maintenance procedures specifically addressing food safety concerns.
  3. Establish verification steps confirming maintenance effectiveness.
  4. Create clear escalation protocols when maintenance issues impact food safety controls.
  5. Review and update maintenance procedures when equipment or processes change.

PCQI training supports preventive controls implementation by building cross-functional understanding of how maintenance practices affect food safety outcomes. Involving maintenance personnel in hazard analysis and preventive controls planning helps to identify overlooked maintenance concerns before they become critical regulatory issues.

Long-Term Maintenance Strategies for Sustainable Food Safety

Creating sustainable food safety requires moving from reactive maintenance to strategic facility management, addressing root causes of contamination risks. Preventive planning allows you to address small issues before they escalate into critical failures or regulatory violations.

Successful maintenance strategies integrate water quality management and environmental controls into standard operating procedures:

Quarterly water quality assessments help you track mineral content fluctuations and detect potential contamination issues before they affect production. Annual plumbing system evaluations identify areas prone to mineral buildup, requiring targeted descaling or component replacement.

Your environmental monitoring should include humidity tracking in processing areas, with documentation of seasonal fluctuations informing ventilation adjustments. Pay particular attention to HVAC maintenance schedules during seasonal transitions when temperature and humidity changes often reveal previously hidden issues.

Water treatment improvements yield multiple operational benefits. For instance, properly treated water reduces chemical usage during cleaning, extends equipment lifespan, and improves product consistency. You’ll typically encounter fewer maintenance calls for equipment malfunctions, particularly for steam-generating equipment and water-cooled systems.

Adding improvements to facilities requires a multifaceted strategy:

  1. Baseline current water quality through comprehensive testing.
  2. Identify critical control points where water quality impacts safety.
  3. Select appropriate treatment technologies based on specific contaminants.
  4. Implement monitoring procedures to verify treatment effectiveness.
  5. Train production staff on maintaining treatment systems.

You’ll find soft water integration improves cleaning effectiveness while reducing chemical consumption and labor requirements. Your product quality can benefit from more consistent flavor profiles and improved texture in water-intensive processing as well.

Renovation Considerations for Maintaining Food Safety

Facility renovations present both opportunities and risks for your food safety compliance. Thoughtful planning turns necessary updates into strategic improvements, driving long-term regulatory compliance, whereas poorly executed projects can introduce new contamination vulnerabilities despite significant capital investment.

Material selection plays a critical role in renovation success. Your food-contact surfaces require non-porous, easily cleanable materials resistant to cleaning chemicals and processing conditions. Even non-contact areas warrant careful material consideration since deteriorating building components can release particulates into production environments. Selecting proper sealants and gaskets prevents moisture intrusion into wall cavities and under equipment, eliminating potential mold growth sites.

Plumbing modifications demand particular scrutiny during renovation planning. Ensure pipe runs avoid areas where leaks could contaminate products or create hidden moisture problems. You can simplify future maintenance access by installing additional clean-outs and inspection ports during renovations, encouraging more frequent inspections and preventive maintenance. Water treatment system upgrades integrated during renovations improve overall facility operations while protecting new equipment investments.

Airflow patterns require careful engineering during facility modifications to prevent cross-contamination between production zones. Pressure differentials between areas with varying risk profiles help contain potential contaminants, which is particularly important when renovations connect previously separated processing areas. Food safety renovation planning should include airflow mapping before and after project completion.

Effective renovation planning requires:

  1. Conducting pre-renovation hazard analysis and identifying potential new risks.
  2. Establishing temporary controls to protect production during construction.
  3. Developing enhanced cleaning protocols for post-construction validation.
  4. Creating detailed documentation of infrastructure changes for future reference.
  5. Updating preventive maintenance programs and incorporating new components.

Post-renovation commissioning should include thorough environmental testing before resuming normal production and establishing new baselines for ongoing monitoring programs.

Final Thoughts

Success in food safety boils down to noticing the small details before they become big problems. Taking care of water quality and managing moisture in your facility creates a strong defense against contamination while keeping you on the right side of regulations. The payoff from this attentive approach is substantial – lower maintenance bills, more effective cleaning, and better product consistency. Instead of treating maintenance as separate from food safety, bringing these concerns together makes everything work better.

 

Eddie Hall, Vital Vio
FST Soapbox

How Automated Technology is Transforming Sanitation in Plant Operations

By Eddie Hall
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Eddie Hall, Vital Vio

Food safety remains a top-of-mind concern for food manufacturers, especially considering some of the top recalls in 2019 were caused by bacteria contamination—including Listeria and E. coli. Every aspect of the plant operation, from maintenance to executives, to junior staff and quality control, holds both responsibility and concern in producing safe food. Unfortunately, there’s a lot at stake when plant operations’ sanitation programs run into issues, which can cause health threats.

While the rapid explosion of new innovations complements our daily lives in efficiency and convenience, plant operations may find difficulty in keeping up-to-speed with new technology such as robotics, drones and automated applications. When facilities’ equipment becomes more and more outdated, it poses food safety challenges around cleaning, maintenance and upgrades.

Luckily, in some cases, innovation is becoming much easier to deploy. Opportunities abound for food processing plants to integrate new technologies into their operations to deliver significant returns on investment while simultaneously enhancing sanitation, safety and production efficiency on the plant floor.

The Dangers with Today’s Practices

There are many pitfalls with older, more traditional cleaning techniques. In a place where cleanliness is critical to food safety and public health around the world, the industry understands sanitation means more than just scrubbing, mopping and wiping. While these are important daily practices to be done around the processing plant, there are still concerns on whether this kind of intermittent cleaning is truly enough to keep surfaces completely sanitized—knowing that continuous cleaning around the clock seems impractical in any facilities.

Unfortunately, there are many areas, some very hard to reach, for bacteria and other pathogens to live and spread around a processing plant. Zone 1, which holds the conveyor belt and other common high-touch points, consistently comes into contact with food, chemicals and humans. However, for processors to reduce the likelihood of contaminated food, they must consider areas outside of Zone 1 as well—including employee break rooms, hallways and bathrooms—to implement automated sanitation technologies. Additionally, the most common food contaminants, such as Listeria, Salmonella and E. coli, are usually invisible to the naked eye. Therefore, plants need to employ automated technology to continuously kill microscopic bacteria, mold and fungi to prevent regrowth and ensure clean food and equipment.

Looking to New Tech to Fight Germs

When looking to upgrade a plant operation facility, automated technology should be top-of-mind. Automated food production technologies solve two main problems: Food safety and sanitation efficiency. Wash-down robotic systems work to prevent food contamination, while other automated robots complete tasks on the production floor such as packaging, transporting and lifting. With the CDC estimating that roughly one in six Americans suffer from foodborne illnesses, the need for improved sanitation design is integral.

In today’s age, there are several ways to achieve heightened cleanliness by incorporating automation and robotics into production lines. Slicers, dicers and cutters are manufactured with hygienic design in mind. Smart cleaning equipment can automatically store various cleaning steps. Data tracking applications can monitor sanitation steps and ensure all boxes are checked throughout the cleaning program.

Incorporating antimicrobial LED lighting ensures sanitation is truly integrated into the facility’s design—working continually 24/7 to kill and prevent bacteria, and its growth while also serving a dual purpose of both antimicrobial protection and a proper source of illumination. As is the case with this type of technology, once these lights are installed, it becomes an easy, hands-free way of reducing labor, chemicals and, in many cases, work stoppages.

According to Meticulous Research, the global food automation market is expected to be worth $14.3 billion by 2025. With automation set to explode, it’s important for leaders in the food and beverage industry to take advantage of safety tech innovations to advance sanitation around the processing plant. Facility upgrades to improve, enhance and automate sanitation could impact food manufacturers in the long-term by decreasing costs, preventing recalls, improving brand value, gaining consumer trust, minimizing risk and impacting the bottom line.

Megan Nichols
FST Soapbox

How Will AR and VR Improve Safety in the Food Industry?

By Megan Ray Nichols
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Megan Nichols

The food and beverage sector is a huge presence in the U.S. economy. As of 2017, the industry employed 1.46 million people across 27,000 different establishments. Total food and beverage sales stand at around $1.4 trillion and add $164 billion in value to the economy as a whole.1 This presents significant opportunities and risks alike. Companies that trade in food products are held to some of the highest regulatory standards. With globalization ongoing and a higher demand than ever for variety and niche products, companies find they need to expand the mobility of their services. They must also broaden their product choices without missing a beat when it comes to quality.

Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) have emerged as unlikely allies in that quest. These technologies are already having a positive impact on food and worker safety in the industry.

Improves New Employee Training

Onboarding and training new employees is a costly and time-consuming endeavor in any industry. Moreover, failure by companies to impart the necessary skills, and failure by employees to retain them, can have ghastly consequences. Errors on assembly lines may result in faulty products, recalls, worker and customer injuries, and worse.

The stakes in the food and beverage sector are just as high as they are in other labor- and detail-oriented industries. VR provides an entirely new kind of training experience for employees, whether they’re working on mastering their pizza cutting technique or brewing the perfect cappuccino. Other times, “getting it right” is about much more than aesthetic appeal and immediate customer satisfaction.

Animal slaughtering and processing facilities represent some of the more extreme examples of potentially dangerous workplaces in the larger food and beverage industry. Between 2011 and 2015, this U.S. sector experienced 73 fatal workplace injuries. Excepting poultry processing, 2015 saw 9,800 recordable incidents in animal processing, or 7.2 cases for every 100 full-time employees.

Some adopters of VR-based employee training claim that virtual reality yields up to an 80% retention rate one year after an employee has been trained. This compares extremely favorably to the estimated 20% retention rate of traditional training techniques.

Training via VR headset can help companies get new hires up to speed faster in a safe, detailed and immersive environment. Food processing and service are high-turnover employment sectors. The right training technology can help workers feel better prepared and more engaged with their work, potentially reducing employee churn.

Helps Eliminate Errors in Food Processing

Augmented reality is already demonstrating great promise in manufacturing, maintenance and other sectors. For instance, an AR headset can give an assembly line worker in an automotive plant detailed, step-by-step breakdowns of their task in their peripheral vision through a digital overlay.

The same goes for food and beverage manufacturing. AR headsets can superimpose a list of inspection or processing tasks for workers to follow as they prepare food items in a manufacturing or distribution facility.

In 2018, there was an estimated 382 recalls involving food products. Augmented reality alone won’t bring that number down to zero. However, it does help reduce instances of line workers and inspectors missing critical steps in processing or packaging that might result in contamination or spoilage.

Eases the Learning Curve in Food Preparation

There are lots of food products in the culinary world that are downright dangerous if they’re not prepared properly and by following specific steps. Elderberries, various species of fish, multiple root vegetables, and even cashews and kidney beans can all induce illness and even death if the right steps aren’t taken to make them fit for consumption.

In early 2019, inspectors descended on a Michelin-starred and highly respected restaurant in Valencia, Spain. The problem? A total of 30 patrons reported falling ill after eating at El País, one of whom lost her life. Everyone reported symptoms similar to food poisoning.

The common element in each case appeared to be morel mushrooms. These are considered a luxury food item, but failure to cook them properly can result in gastric problems and worse. Augmented reality could greatly reduce the likelihood of incidents like this in the future by providing ongoing guidance and reminders to new and veteran chefs alike, without taking the bulk of their attention away from work.

Brings New Efficiencies to Warehousing and Pick-and-Pack

Consumers around the globe are getting used to ordering even highly perishable foodstuffs over the internet—and there’s no putting that genie back in the bottle. Amazon’s takeover of Whole Foods is an indicator of what’s to come: Hundreds of freezer-equipped and climate-controlled warehouses located within a stone’s throw from a majority of the American population.

Ensuring smooth operations in perishable food and beverage supply chains is a major and ongoing struggle. It’s not just a practical headache for companies—it’s something of a moral imperative, too. The World Health Organization finds that around 600 million individuals worldwide fall ill each year due to foodborne illnesses.

Augmented reality won’t completely solve this problem, but it may greatly reduce a major source of potential spoilage and contamination: Inefficiencies in picking and packing operations. Order pickers equipped with AR headsets can:

  • Receive visual prompts to quickly find their way to designated stow locations in refrigerated warehouses after receiving refrigerated freight.
  • Locate pick locations more efficiently while retrieving single items or when they already have a partial order of perishable goods picked.

In both cases, the visual cues provided by AR help employees navigate warehousing locations much more quickly and efficiently. This substantially lowers the likelihood that food products are stuck in limbo in unrefrigerated areas, potentially coming into contact with noncompliant temperatures or pathogens. The FDA recognizes mispackaged and mislabeled food products as a major public health risk.

For food and beverage companies, AR should be a welcome development and a worthy investment. FSMA recognized that 48 million Americans get sick each year from compromised foods. The act required these entities to be much more proactive in drawing up prevention plans for known sources of contamination and to be more deliberate in standardizing their processes for safety’s sake.

AR and VR Boost Food, Worker and Customer Safety

Augmented and virtual reality may seem like an unusual ally in an industry where most consumers are primarily focused on the aesthetic and sensory aspects of the experience. However, there’s a whole world that lives and dies according to the speed and attention to detail of employees and decision-makers alike. Augmented realities, and entirely new ones, point the way forward.

Reference

  1. Committee for Economic Development of The Conference Board. (March 2017). “Economic Contribution of the Food and Beverage Industry. Retrieved from https://www.ced.org/pdf/Economic_Contribution_of_the_Food_and_Beverage_Industry.pdf.
Challenge

Three of the Most Common Maintenance Challenges In the Food And Beverage Industry

By Bryan Christiansen
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Challenge

Food and beverage professionals will agree that food manufacturing is a sector with conditions like no other. The industry is highly regulated because its products are for human consumption. Any deviation from strict control can lead to contaminated products with the possibility of outbreaks, illnesses and lawsuits.

Thus, maintenance managers in food manufacturing must contend with several unique challenges that come with multiple regulatory bodies, keeping highly automated and complex equipment running, and ensuring workers’ safety, all while producing hygienic goods.

This article will review three of the most common maintenance challenges being experienced in the food and beverage industry and some recommendations on how to deal with them.

1. Maintaining Complex Equipment

A typical food and drink processing plant today would be fitted with an array of complicated and highly sensitive equipment. From peeling machines to refrigeration plants and very complex packing machinery, every component demands constant attention.

Each one of these assets is part of a fast-moving production line that require specialized skills to monitor and keep in peak operating condition. In addition, this industry is under constant pressure to both improve and modify existing machinery, while also adopting new technology (especially automation).

Many food processors need to run their production 24/7 to stay competitive. It is apparent that the maintenance team has a lot to handle under such conditions,

To maintain the highly automated systems and keep equipment running optimally, food production and maintenance managers must stay on top of new techniques. They need to research, provide ideas and adopt newer and better maintenance strategies. Although it’s expected that there would already be some maintenance schedule in place, just any old routine will not work.

Imagine trying to run such a sensitive system on reactive maintenance alone where components are left to fail before repairs are carried out. Downtime would be disproportionately high and the enterprise runs the risk of shortening the lifespan of their assets. Instead, it is advisable to switch from reactive to preventive maintenance or look to implement any of the other proactive maintenance strategies like predictive maintenance or reliability-centered maintenance.

A proactive maintenance strategy is the most straightforward way to improve overall maintenance operations that will keep downtime and the associated stress of loss of revenue to the minimum.

2. Extremely Hygienic Workplace

Because they make products for human consumption, food and beverage manufacturers must enforce hygienic practices and maintain their equipment under the highest standards of food safety.

Failure to do this can lead to many serious problems like producing contaminated food, product recalls, foreign material complaints, lawsuits, outbreaks and infections (botulism, E. coli, Listeria, etc.).

To avoid the above, food and beverage manufacturers should pay attention to the following:

  • Pest control. Adopt pest detection, monitoring and control with or without the use of chemicals. Where chemicals are used, there should be extra care to avoid food and drink contamination.
  • Cleaning. Constant cleaning and disinfection is necessary to maintain high hygiene standards and reduce any risks of foreign materials complaints and foodborne illnesses outbreak. Cleaning also helps prevent injuries to workers particularly in the processing and packing areas where the risk of slips, trips and falls increases due to wet floors. Wet floors alone account for the second highest cause of injuries in the food industry, according to Health and Safety Executive.
  • Personal hygiene. Establish written and strict protocols for personal cleanliness of staff that include the use of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE).
  • Waste management. Prompt removal of waste materials to control odor and deter pests and rodents.
  • Overall maintenance. Adopt proactive maintenance schedules for the entire plant and all food processing machinery.
  • Staff training. Employees should be educated and trained for their own safety and to preserve the integrity of the plant and its products. This is vital for success because procedures will only be as good as the team that will implement them.

3. Compliance With Regulatory Standard

Manufacturers of edible products are subject to the regulations imposed by the relevant authorities in every country in which they operate. This means food and beverage manufacturers must:

  • Deal with a wide range of regulations regarding food safety.
  • Ensure strict enforcement with policies and procedures that could vary from country to country.

For example, manufacturers in the United States are subject to USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) regulations and those of the FDA. Food and drink processors in the UK are regulated by the Food Standards Agency.

Officials from these agencies are authorized to carry out unannounced routine inspections or complaints-based inspections. There are some critical food safety non-compliance issues they typically look out for. Maintenance managers must be aware of them and they include:

  • General cleaning. To minimize the risk of food contamination.
  • Machine safety. Machinery must be safe to use, all electrical faults should be corrected quickly, and any safety guards must be in place. Safety breaches in this regard can lead to serious injuries. An example is this 2014 case involving food giant Henz and a maintenance engineer where the employee lost an arm in an unguarded potato peeling machine.
    ● Food Safety. Machinery must run efficiently, be clean, keep food and drinks at the right temperature, be free of rust, etc.
    ● Pest Control.

To thrive in this industry, organizations need to be fully aware of the regulations appropriate to their kind of business and the risks under which they operate. The risk of contamination is ever-present but unfortunately, the nature of the business means this risk can not be completely eliminated.

One route for managing these challenges is a proactive and well-implemented preventive maintenance strategy supported by a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) and properly trained staff. CMMS is designed to help you schedule, monitor, and automate your proactive maintenance work which enables you to stay in complete control of your maintenance operations at all times.

Such a well-maintained plant will be cleaner, last longer, run smoothly and generally perform more efficiently.