Consumers rely on food processing plants to maintain the utmost standards when it comes to cleaning and sanitizing. It’s the responsibility of the company to uphold food plant sanitation best practices to protect food safety standards, workers, and consumers. Health hazards, like foodborne illness and other types of bacteria and viruses, can spread rapidly due to cross-contamination in a facility where cleaning and sanitizing aren’t prioritized.
With COVID-19, there’s also the added complexity of properly cleaning and disinfecting working areas to avoid potential infection spread within workers in your facility. When this happens, there is a loss of productivity from workers who call in sick and a growing lack of trust in the plant from the general population. If too many workers get sick (as we have seen throughout the pandemic) the facility may be shut down for several weeks for complete sanitization and disinfection.
For these reasons, it’s critical to understand the cleaning and sanitation procedures in the food industry and plan accordingly.
How to Clean Your Food Processing Plant
The key to a good cleaning process and sanitation program is by educating workers on what needs to be done to ensure safety protocols to avoid cross-contamination, bacteria growth, and airborne viruses. Many food processing plants have sanitation teams, but it’s smart to educate workers on how they can help while they are working on the floor. Though disinfecting kills pathogens at a higher rate than sanitization, FDA guidelines include sanitizing all food-contact surfaces after every use¹.
Sanitize Food Contact Surfaces
Any food contact surface will inevitably get messy due to food work, prep, and cooking stations. These areas should be cleaned and sanitized after every use during the workday. Disinfectants should be used at the end of the workday, as the use of strong chemicals could impact food quality.
Maintaining proper standards will reduce the risk of food cross-contamination, including keeping raw meat containers away from cooked products or using multiple cutting boards when dealing with cooked/raw food. Additionally, it will keep a healthy environment for both workers and consumers. Along with keeping your food processing equipment sanitized and disinfected (which we will discuss below), this is the most critical component of a healthy processing plant.
Keep Food Processing Equipment Sanitized
Since food processing equipment generally deals with the same type of food products that are used on flat work surfaces, the cleaning standards are the same. Hot soapy water, sanitizer, and disinfectant will kill the harmful pathogens that could cause illness or cross-contamination on smaller items like knives, containers, and more.
Equipment used to manufacture food should be kept clean throughout the day and scrubbed daily. FDA-approved sanitizers and disinfectants can be used on larger processing pieces. There should be a dedicated storage area that is kept thoroughly sanitized to store equipment when not in use.