Plant Safety and Sanitation in a Wet Environment

Process Water Can Create as Many Problems as It Solves,Using Less Water is the Solution — except when it's not

Soft drink bottlers and other beverage companies straddle the arid and saturated worlds: Their finished goods are water-based, but (ideally) they process in a dry environment.

The dryness of the environment can be disputed. Walk through any fluid milk plant or brewery, and the slip-and-fall dangers from water on the floor are apparent. Ideally, however, the environment is closer to a bakery than a poultry plant.

Water is necessary for microbial life, and footwear baths can become breeding grounds for pathogenic bacteria if not properly maintained. Rather than flirt with having plant personnel tracking in harmful microbes on their shoes, beverage plants are moving away from water-based baths and toward quaternary ammonium compounds and other solids in doorways.

Conversely, hand sanitation often relies on antibacterial gels or alcohol rinses in beverage facilities, and the efficacy of those sanitizers is being questioned.

Just as equipment and food-contact surfaces must be cleaned before they can be sanitized, people's hands must be free of residual soil before they can be sanitized. In the view of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), soap and water is a best practice for handwashing in both food and beverage production facilities.

Water conservation is a tough sell, as Nalco chemical company and Johnson Diversey discovered when they partnered on a water-monitoring service, first in Europe in 2000 and then in North America a few years later. Both companies were acquired in 2011, Nalco by Ecolab and the Diversey organization by Sealed Air Corp. Now known as the food care division of Sealed Air, Racine, Wis.-based Diversey continues to offer a water optimization program for the beverage industry, positioned as a way to reduce total cost of operation (TCO) rather than conservation, according to Mike Lammers, senior beverage and brewing sector specialist.

The 20-second rule

If less water for equipment cleaning is the goal, more water for personal hygiene is the direction in beverage processing. According to Michele Colbert, vice president of sales & marketing at Meritech, Golden, Colo., food safety auditors are chastising beverage plants that rely exclusively on waterless sanitizers and insisting they make soap and water available to workers to meet the standards under Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) programs such as SQF and BRC.

"The beverage industry in the past has been getting by with gel-type sanitizers, which are not acceptable to third-party auditors," Colbert maintains. The plants are being required to install sinks or automated handwashing systems such as Meritech's if they hope to be certified under GFSI programs. "Instant sanitizers are everywhere, but they create a false sense that they remove all debris and kill everything, when they don't."

Even among sanitizer suppliers, there's little argument. "Proper hand hygiene is the food processing plant's first line of defense against food contamination," responds Harold Tyreman, vice president of sales and marketing at Gojo Industries Inc., the Akron, Ohio, hygienic products supplier that counts Purell among its brands. "This includes washing with soap and water when hands are visibly soiled followed by the use of an alcohol-based hand sanitizer. For food processing plants in particular, Gojo recommends using appropriate products based on the area of the plant where hand hygiene needs to take place."

Thorough hand washing is a basic requirement under section 110 of 21 CFR 11, which outlines good manufacturing practices for food and beverage manufacturers. FDA defaults to the CDC for the specifics of proper handwashing. CDC has helped spotlight the potential for human-to-human transmission of norovirus, and instant sanitizers are ineffective against those agents of gastrointenstinal disease, according to Colbert. Soap and water can remove the virus, provided people in the plant comply with the handwashing requirement and continue the process for 20 seconds.

Automated systems like Meritech's CleanTech 500C deliver a 4 log reduction in norovirus in 12 seconds, she adds, with the additional benefit of recording and documenting the process for review by auditors.

Source: FoodProcessing

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