It All Starts with Sanitation: The First Line of Defense in Food Safety

It All Starts with Sanitation

It’s 6:00 a.m. Today is like every other day at the facility—it's time to get everything fired up. The production schedule for today’s run has been posted. Operators are moving various carts with parts around, starting to set up their equipment. The clank of metal can be heard across the room as employees start to arrive, help with setup, and take their positions on the line. From their perspective, this is what they walk into and is part of their routine.  However, what is not readily known to them is how those parts got cleaned.

Every day across America, food companies produce the food we and our animals eat. But before they start making that food, we hope that another group of people, the “sanitarians,” do their job by cleaning and sanitizing all the equipment, utensils, and parts that operators will use in food production.

Proper sanitation is essential to the safety of our food supply. It is the first step toward food safety. Care must be taken to create documented breaks that utilize sanitation as a reset mechanism to ensure food-contact and non-food-contact areas are clean from debris, foreign materials, and microbial concerns.

Sanitation Gone Wrong

What happens when manufacturing facilities fail to understand the risks of what an unclean system can bring?

1. Product adulteration by foreign material, pathogens, and various cleaning chemicals or sanitizing agents.
2. Recalls, potentially involving multiple products, due to cross-contamination from improper cleaning or sanitizing.
3. Human and pet illness or death.
4. Litigation that could involve tens of thousands of dollars.
5. Brand damage, loss of customer base, loss of customer trust, and even possibly bankruptcy.

If you follow any of the various sources for information regarding pathogen recalls, you will often see an initial recall, which expands in a few weeks into many thousands of pounds of product. This is often caused by improper sanitation, where no clean break can be established, and thus, multiple products become suspect.

What Should Manufacturers Consider When Creating a Robust Sanitation Program that Supports Overall Food Safety?

Good food sanitation programs do not contain just one element. They are comprised of many elements that, together, are the building blocks of a great food safety program.

1. Risk-Based Master Sanitation Schedule: A Risk-Based Master Sanitation Schedule prioritizes cleaning and sanitation tasks based on potential contamination risks. This approach ensures that high-risk areas are sanitized more frequently, protecting food safety and maintaining compliance with regulatory standards. Environmental swabbing data often supports these assessments.
2. Plant Sanitary Design: Plant sanitary design focuses on creating a facility layout and selecting materials that prevent contamination, facilitate effective cleaning, and ensure safe food production. Proper design helps reduce pest issues, allows for easy sanitation, and minimizes cross-contamination risks. Equipment selection should be made with sanitation in mind and consist of materials, such as stainless steel, which avoid pitting and harborage points where biofilms can easily be removed. The facility should employ good practices for food production, such as sanitary welds instead of beading, removal of dead-end piping, proper floor sloping and drainage, cleanable wall surfaces, using curves instead of angled piping, and equipment that can easily be opened and inspected.
3. Selection of Cleaning Chemicals and Sanitizers: Choosing the right cleaning chemicals and sanitizers for a food manufacturing facility requires careful consideration to ensure compatibility with equipment and facility areas. Effective products should eliminate pathogens without damaging surfaces, maintaining equipment safety and longevity. In many cases, general degreasers, organic acids, and caustics will all be deployed in the same facility. Care must also be taken to ensure the safety of sanitarians and the personal protective equipment they use.
4. Proper Cleaning Chemical Use with Records: Accurate concentration of cleaning chemicals and sanitizers is crucial for their efficacy and safety. Overusing chemicals is wasteful and does not always increase cleaning or sanitation efforts. Documenting these concentrations through records helps verify compliance, ensure consistency, and support food safety audits and inspections.
5. Thorough Employee Training: Effective sanitation requires thorough employee training in cleaning procedures, especially for complex equipment and high-risk areas. Proper training reduces contamination risks, ensures consistent practices, and boosts overall food safety in the facility. A good hint is to consider harborage points and difficult-to-clean areas. When cleaning, the inside of equipment is often as important as the outside surface.
6. Preoperative Inspection Program: Trained personnel should perform preoperative inspections to verify that equipment and areas are clean before production starts. This program helps catch sanitation issues early, preventing potential contamination and ensuring safe food processing. Organoleptic training should be given so inspectors learn to use sight, smell, and touch to ensure that biofilm residues have been completely removed, leaving clean surfaces.
7. Robust Environmental Swabbing Program: An environmental swabbing program monitors surfaces for potential contaminants, providing a critical layer of protection in the sanitation process. Regular swabbing can detect harmful pathogens and biofilm build-up and help track contamination sources before they impact food safety. The frequency and location of swabbing should encompass all major contact surfaces and non-contact surfaces at a level to detect problems. If you’re only doing the bare minimum and not performing risk-based statistical sampling, you’re probably just wasting valuable company resources.
8. Accurate Sanitation Record Keeping: Accurate sanitation records document cleaning and inspection activities and serve as evidence of compliance with food safety regulations. Proper record keeping aids in audits, helps identify trends, and ensures accountability within the sanitation program. 

What’s Next?

Monitor your program and determine if it is working. If you never find hot spots during your monitoring activities, you’re either doing great sanitation work or missing something. It is rare that some kind of deficiency is not found. It is just as rare that you do not have periodic environmental swab failures. If all the records are perfect, the auditor's first thought is that something is lacking in the program. It’s the ol’ saying: trust but verify.

Starting on a clean system daily gives operations the needed separation between production runs to control cross-contamination safely. This will limit exposure in the event of product withdrawal.

It is easy to become blind to various sanitation opportunities. Sometimes, the best way to test your program is to have third-party eyes who have the experience to identify potential gaps. Our Assurance and Engineering teams at BSM Partners have decades of experience with plant designs, program validation, and sanitation program development. We are here to help.

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About the Author

August Konie has been a Food Safety, Quality and Regulatory Professional for over 30 years. He was worked in many sectors of the food industry including fisheries, beverages, poultry, pork and pet food, under both FDA and USDA regulatory oversight. As an active committee member in various trade organization for food and pet food organizations, he was successful of implementing new regulatory guidance. He has worked with various teams across Asian, Europe, North and South American on various food safety, quality and import/export concerns. He currently serves as the Principal of BSM Assurance overseeing FSQAR activities at BSM Partners.