KANSAS CITY — Karl Thorson, global food safety and sanitation manager at Minneapolis-based General Mills, is a proponent of video sanitation standard operating procedures (SSOPs) for teaching the fundamentals of the job to a large workforce. His team at General Mills has produced 17 videos in five different languages that cover the basics of sanitation and are available on YouTube.

In many ways, the short videos follow the same principles as learning how to repair a car or fix something around the house.

“I want to give somebody a video where they can see the best practices, they can pause the video, they can rewind it, they can jump to the chapter that they need to see,” he told Baking & Snack for its October sanitation report. “It’s a helpful tool for them.”

To develop a video SSOP library that fits a bakery operation, he suggested collaborating with equipment manufacturers, tool vendors, chemical providers and other third-party suppliers to demonstrate best practices not just for cleaning but for lifecycle management of equipment. Mr. Thorson said the next step involves equipment-specific video SSOPs, such as for a horizontal bar mixer used in many General Mills bakeries.

In addition to sharing them on YouTube, the videos can be put into an MP4 file format and dropped into a bakery’s learning management system as a part of an ongoing training program.

“If I can develop that, there’s no reason to recreate the wheel for all these plants,” he said. “There’s going to have to be some customization because each bakery has different color-coded tools and other procedures.”