Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
5
Plant sanitation
C.F. Loughney and S.R. Brown
Reasons for cleaning and disinfecting plant
It can never be assumed that the reasons for cleaning and
disinfecting meat plants are sufficiently obvious to those
responsible for practical plant hygiene or indeed that the
procedures are simple enough to dispense with planning
and training. The technology of plant cleaning and dis-
infection is a complex and changing mix of engineering,
chemistry and microbiology, with many details to be
understood and actions to be taken. Furthermore, this
technology mix alone will not deliver effective and
consistent open plant hygiene. That can only be realised
by well-trained people working to procedures that are
validated, documented and monitored; in short, profes-
sional management is also a key ingredient. It is therefore
essential that the importance of plant hygiene be recog-
nised at all levels within a meat/food plant organisation
and that the scientific principles and professional man-
agement techniques are understood and employed by all
concerned.
Food plants are cleaned for many reasons:
•
To meet national and EU legislation (Council
Regulation (EC) No 852/2004 and 853/2004) and the
associated inspections by the relevant authorities
•
To reduce the risk of litigation in relation to food
poisoning and foreign body contamination
•
To engender and maintain a general quality ethos
within the entire organisation
•
To meet retail customers' and consumers' quality
expectations
•
To satisfy the increasing number of standardised retail
customer audits, for example, IFS (International Food
Standard, 2007) and BRC Audit (British Retail
Consortium, 2011)
•
To allow maximum plant productivity
•
To project a hygienic visual image
•
To ensure the safety of operatives and maintenance staff
•
To help secure the shelf life of the products
•
To avoid pest infestation
•
To protect marketplace reputation
Although perhaps it is the most subjective reason of all,
the
visual image
that a factory projects to a visitor
can strongly influence securing or losing a customer
contract or a competent authority approval. Additionally,
it has a direct bearing on employee morale and the devel-
opment of a total quality ethos. For these reasons, visual
cleanliness and the absence of visible deposits and corro-
sion in the plant are goals as important as the control of
microbiological and foreign body risks.
Cleaning unavoidably incurs costs and time and thus,
from a production or finance manager's point of view,
it is often seen as a necessary but unproductive evil. It is
however rare to find these costs being fully analysed
and controlled in a meat plant or indeed a link made to
the benefits. Often, the obvious elements only, such as
consumable hygiene chemicals, are stressed rather than
the complete context of the hygiene budget. Full hygiene
budgeting should properly include a factor relating to
the possible catastrophic effects of hygiene failure and
the protection of investment made in plant and brand
image. Only with a full analysis of the business risk of
poor hygiene (impact × probability) can the direct costs
of hygiene be seen in their genuine context.
