Food Plant Sanitation Services

The first step to an effective sanitation is removing excess soils with dry pickup. In areas near the production floor, like dry goods warehouses or employee welfare areas, dry pickup might be the only cleaning method you need. As the name “dry” implies, this step is cleaning without water–maybe scraping or using a brush or tools to remove any dirt. In production areas, dry pickup might go a bit further. These areas might also need vacuuming, which not only removes or loosens dry material, it also collects what it removes so it can be taken away from the production area.

This eliminates more dirt and grime before you apply compounds or scrub equipment. Use a top-down approach and rinse with hot water and high pressure to fully loosen anything that might be on your equipment or food contact surfaces. Some pre-rinse might contain detergents in low concentrations to make the process easier. It’s always best to complete this step soon after production ends to reduce residual buildup on equipment.

After the initial two steps of removing any dirt or grime, start applying detergents and/or cleaners. Be sure to consider that water characteristics can have an impact on detergents. Some chemicals might interact with elements of the water and make it less effective. Choose your cleaning agent or compound based on what kind of soil is there. Heavy organic residue oil (fats, meat residues, etc.) need more alkaline cleaners to successfully remove them.

Post-Rinse keeps cleaning agents and detergents from transferring to food. You don’t want possibly abrasive or harmful cleaners in your product. Post-rinse is just one more rinsing step to remove cleaners from equipment and places that might come in contact with food.

A post typically involves segmented inspections. They might involve several groups or departments as well as multiple layers of staff, inspecting areas fully or in a randomly sampled inspection process, including equipment or hygienic zones. People who work in a particular area might be more familiar with spots where there’s more likely to be buildup. By breaking this step down into separate areas and groups of people, you divide the work to make sure it’s well done.

Your last visual review is the pre-op, This checks how clean your facilities and equipment are. Pre-op inspections are very detail-oriented. The Food Safety specialists inspect areas, lines, or pieces of equipment using a random generator program. If anything is found during the pre-op inspection, you have to start taking (and documenting) corrective actions to keep the entire sanitation program from breaking down.

The last step for sanitation is applying sanitizers. After the pre-op inspection is complete, apply sanitizers to food contact surfaces and nearby zones, according to your SSOPs. Sanitizers don’t work on areas that haven’t already been cleaned—they sanitize at the microbiological level. This one step doesn’t replace the rest of the cleaning and sanitation process.