When it comes to cleaning and food safety, sanitation needs to closely collaborate with their partners maintenance. While both sanitation and maintenance are indirect costs of manufacturing, they are also essential to boosting operational efficiencies.

“Normally, the downtime needs to be divided up between maintenance and sanitation, which means the site needs to have a good plan in place to reduce unnecessary time waste,” noted Bret Zaher, manager at AIB International. “It is better if maintenance tasks are completed first, followed by cleaning and sanitizing. After maintenance, a proper cleaning may require staggering cleaning crew start times or even doubling and tripling the number of employees put on equipment to get it cleaned faster so the production process can resume on time.”

Another option involves sectioning off the cleaning area with plastic sheeting or curtains while production remains operating in other parts of the facility — as long as the operating line isn’t directly next to the sanitation or maintenance area.

“Communication is key to ensuring that the mechanic and sanitor are coordinated to be efficient,” Mr. Zaher observed. “If needed, align the sanitor’s start time with the mechanic’s rather than sticking to a shift reporting time.”

With a shorter window of scheduled downtime, the workloads between sanitation and maintenance crews often need to be perfectly sequenced, noted Rowdy Brixey, president of Brixey Engineering Inc.

Sanitation crews may have to initially pre-clean the equipment from heavy debris prior to preventive maintenance and repairs. Afterward, sanitation must thoroughly clean and sanitize the equipment for safe food production.

All work must then be documented for food safety, and any delays can throw the process off schedule. Failure to plan can create an unnecessary emergency for another department.

“You can often substitute the word ‘sanitation’ for ‘maintenance’ and vice versa in almost any discussion about either one,” Mr. Brixey said. “They’re often interchangeable since the tasks are so interrelated.”

Karl Thorson, global food safety and sanitation manager, General Mills, Minneapolis, said labor plays a huge role with successful scheduling along with developing processes so that sanitation crews can clean as easily and as quickly as possible. He proposed using the KISS principle — keep it safe and simple — for sanitation and prioritizing when to clean machines by answering key questions.

“How do we minimize aggressive cleaning of equipment, and how often do we need to clean it?” he asked. “Can I extend my production run time and not clean the entire line? What about breaking up the time for cleaning different pieces of equipment? Maybe the slurry system can go two weeks without cleaning and maybe the oven can go months without cleaning. We have to look at each unit individually to justify the frequency and the method of cleaning.”

To reduce cleaning times, Mr. Zaher recommended storing all the cleaning equipment in one place.

“The employees must have access to enough vacuums, ladders and skyjacks to complete their jobs; foamers, chemical proportioners and scrubbers must be checked to make sure they are working prior to the down day,” he said. “Having a clean-out-of-place tank and/or small parts washer also saves time during cleaning.” 

The order in which the cleaning is done also plays a huge time factor.

“Avoid cleaning floors and drains prior to the production line being cleaned,” Mr. Zaher advised. “Otherwise, everything will have to be cleaned and sanitized again. Do not clean the production line if you haven’t cleaned the overhead.”

This article is an excerpt from the October 2023 issue of Baking & Snack. To read the entire feature on Sanitation, click here.