Ensuring the Highest Hygiene Levels in Food and Pharmaceutical Industries
Hygiene practices must be followed and regulated in any food or pharmaceutical manufacturing environment. Doing so prevents contamination, ensures high-quality products, and keeps customers, patients, and workers safe.
Here are Some Key Areas to Focus on to Ensure this
Ensuring Optimal Hygiene Levels
Ensure Adequate Changing Facilities
Human contamination is a serious concern in these industries. Our clothes and bodies pick up all manner of things all the time and you do not want them ending up in a product. Every food, beverage, and pharmaceutical manufacturing facility must ensure adequate hygiene and changing facilities with a focus on handwashing facilities, welfare equipment, and directional flow. Layout and directional flow ensure everyone passes through the facility in one direction. While doing this, they must have the right personal protective equipment for that facility and its products.
The facility should also provide changing and welfare facilities for the management of clean and soiled workwear. Facilities must also provide lockers so workers can put away their belongings before entering the manufacturing floor. In the food industry, handwashing is typically the first defense against contamination. The facility must provide handwashing facilities and train workers on how to wash their hands properly.
Use Hygienic Process Equipment
When dealing with sensitive products such as food, beverages, and pharmaceuticals, you must ensure all equipment used is hygienic. In most cases, that comes down to the material the equipment is made out of. You want equipment made of materials that will remain hygienic and sanitary in different environments and throughout different processes.
Materials like stainless steel and nickel alloys perform exceptionally well in environments with high temperatures, acidic, basic, and caustic materials, where oxidation, scaling, and corrosion would present hygiene and contamination concerns.
Of particular concern are the tubing, fittings, and storage equipment used in different food and pharmaceutical manufacturing processes. Businesses should also choose different pumps for hygienic industries made of materials that ensure high hygiene standards.
Ensure Proper Temperature Control
Food and certain pharmaceuticals are highly sensitive to temperature. It is therefore crucial that food and pharmaceutical manufacturers ensure the right temperatures on the production floor and in storage facilities.
It is also vital that products stay at the right temperature during transportation. While doing this, workers should try to minimize and shorten transfer windows as much as possible. The transfer window is the time it takes to transport the products manually from a truck or other transportation option into an area with regulated temperatures.
Have Storage and Organization Strategies in Place
There is always the risk of cross-contamination if finished products are stored alongside raw materials, especially in the food industry. As with the changing facilities, managers should ensure traffic and products flow in one direction and separate areas for products in different production or manufacturing stages.
Food and pharmaceutical products are highly sensitive to contamination, so managers, workers, and supervisors must ensure the highest hygiene standards throughout the storage, manufacturing, and transportation cycles. The good news is that focusing on a few key areas will drastically reduce this risk, but players in these industries must take additional measures to ensure their customers, workers, and patients remain safe.
