Sanitation and safety for food and beverage equipment

Food and beverage equipment must be safe and sanitary. In fact, food safety in particular is a key factor that will drive ROI for food and beverage manufacturers in coming years. Consider some specific examples: End users of grain milling, pasta making, and baking equipment have increasingly prioritized equipment that is quieter than past iterations — to protect the hearing of plant personnel working near or on conveyors especially. Safety features to prevent burn injuries have also become more sophisticated. In contrast, equipment associated with fish and poultry processing is designed with cleanability as the top design objective, to protect end product as well as plant personnel from exposure to microorganisms.

Cleanliness is a top food-industry design objective.

Machinery associated with beer, wine, and spirit production require regular cleaning with caustic chemicals; here, the emphasis is on proper employee protocols and training, plant ventilation, and equipment. Downstream from component suppliers in the industry foodchain (pun intended) bottling-machine OEMs have pioneered the inclusion of many safety features to modernize beverage-bottling applications. In lieu of laws, industry standards dictate the integration of safety in these types of machines. Individual OEMs decide based on proper risk assessment on how much safety (in the form of guards, light curtains, and stops) to include.

Installations associated with slaughtering and meatpacking is the ultimate challenge of safety engineers. Stations for cutting, eviscerating, jointing, and boning animal carcasses are inherently dangerous; despite best efforts at improving processes, both knife-related and repetitive strain injuries occur. No wonder more automation of the grisliest and physically taxing operations is increasingly common — especially over the last five years.

Upton Sinclair’s work unintentionally made the link between food-processing work environments and food product quality.

Each generation of equipment associated with fruit, vegetable, and baby-food washing, blanching, peeling, packaging, canning, jarring, and freezing is increasingly effective at preventing foodborne illness. Cleanability especially is important where the bacteria predominant in a given crop’s fields could prove deadly if allowed to flourish in the processing setting.

In contrast, the design of equipment associated with candy making prioritizes quality control and cleanability to minimize ant, cockroach, and other insect infestations attracted by sweet substances. What’s more, U.S. consumers are more aware of allergies than ever — including peanut, tree nut, and gluten allergies — so are more carefully reading labels. No wonder confectionary and other food producers have over the last 20 years in particular boosted investment in equipment satisfying high ingredient-segregation and sanitary standards.

Dr. Temple Grandin is a professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University. Her research and insight into animal behavior have (among other things) resulted in more humane slaughterhouses.

The newest equipment for dairy and cheese making as well as that for oil and fat extraction and rendering adhere to the highest easy-clean construction standards for corrosive food and cleaning-agent resistance. Explicitly defined methods for machine design, fabrication, and installation are based on facility layouts that themselves adhere to hygiene-oriented standards. For oil and butter production, this includes plant layouts to minimize equipment-operator slips and falls.

Equipment associated with candy making prioritizes quality control and cleanability to minimize ant, cockroach, and other insect infestations. Image: Dreamstime © Vivegum Roy

Food-safety standards background

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that almost 50 million Americans get sick every year from foodborne diseases — and 3,000 die each year from the same. The CDC publishes food-safety information on cdc.gov/FoodNet. Food Safety Progress Reports are regularly published on this site — released by the CDC to track outbreaks of the six most common food-borne pathogens. Tracking public disease outbreaks are better than ever and confirm that government regulations are effective in reducing food-related illnesses.

Indeed, food safety has come a long way in just a century: Muckraker Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle in 1906 to expose food-plant working conditions in industrialized cities such as Chicago. The unintended response to the book was horror not from immigrants’ work conditions but rather the terribly unsanitary environments at packing plants at the time. Indeed, today even animal health and welfare are of increased focus as evidenced by adoption of practices design by agriculturist Temple Grandin. Federal laws dictate what constitutes healthy and humane treatment of animals. Especially in the meat and poultry industry, there’s more recognition now that there’s an intersection of general animal welfare and orderly and sanitary meat processing — resulting in more wholesome product.

FDA regulations outline the steps that food manufacturers must take to minimize the incidence of foodborne illness caused by listeria and other pathogens. Image: Felipe Caparros Cruz

The most significant legislation of the last 20 years to minimize foodborne disease in the U.S. is the Food Safety Modernization Act or FSMA. Congress enacted FSMA in response to dramatic changes in global food production and distribution.

Broadening, building, and improving on existing approaches for food safety is the relatively new amendment to the Food, Drugs, and Cosmetics Act called the Food Safety Modernization Act — or FSMA. This FSMA legislation expands food-safety practices to focus on preventive controls.

The first FSMA rule ensures produce safety by dictating proper procedures for farming, harvesting, packing, and storing fruits and vegetables that are typically consumed raw. For example, irrigation water must be show microbiological counts especially E. coli) below certain thresholds. Various spouts crops are subject to their own standards. This rule is the result of unprecedented FDA outreach to industry, consumer groups, and federal, state, local, and tribal regulatory counterparts — as well as academia and other stakeholders.

The second FSMA rule outlines a foreign supplier-verification program to prevent food importers from adulterating or mislabeling food brought into the U.S. The third FSMA rule outlines requirements for sanitary transportation of food — dictating the proper temperature and vehicle cleanliness for products transported by truck or rail.

The fourth FSMA rule requires food manufacturers to execute their own Defense Plans to prevent sabotage, poisoning or other intentional adulteration of its product on its way to consumers. Particularly vulnerable steps in the manufacturing process must be identified and managed. The fifth FSMA rule outlines steps for third-party auditors to achieve accredited certification. These auditors can then conduct safety inspections and issuing safe-food certifications to foreign humans and animal food importers.

The sixth FSMA rule (applicable to food for both human and animal consumption) requires food producers to identify hazards and prevent problems via raw-ingredient supply-chain controls; employee education on safety and hygiene during food handling; and corrective actions (including recalls) when issues are noted.

The seventh and final rule outlines a volunteer qualified importer program for foreign food facilities wanting to speed import-product inspection. Prescreening verifies that participating companies abide by U.S. regulations.