Bakers have many tools at their fingertips to improve their food safety and sanitation. Dry steamers and dry ice can help sanitarians clean areas that need to be dry cleaned. Swabbing and testing ensures that the cleaning has been effective. Data, however, is the next frontier in making sanitation more efficient and effective than ever. 

“Data holds immense value in the current landscape,” said Wan Mei Leong, food safety specialist, Commercial Food Sanitation, an Intralox company. “By leveraging equipment and verification tools that offer insights into staff usage, compliance with sanitation and adherence to food safety protocols, you can utilize this data to consistently identify and mitigate food safety risks alongside your team.”

Time studies can reveal how efficient cleaning is currently and where the pain points are. Korrin Doyle, food safety and sanitation director, Southeast region, ABM Industries, pointed out that this kind of data tracked over time can reveal which pieces of equipment are the most time-consuming to clean. Other data bakers can collect include customer complaints, food safety complaints, different types of swabs of equipment and the environment. 

“They have to look at the big picture and let it tell the story for you,” she said. “You can see reoccurring failures and then do root cause analysis.” 

Will Eaton, vice president of sales and marketing, Meritech, noted that other KPIs for sanitation can include allergen tests, aerobic plate count (APC) /mold counts and visual inspection. 

“Regular data collection verifies the effectiveness of sanitation and food safety plans, such as hygienic zoning separation, hurdle placement and good manufacturing practices,” he said. 

With the implementation of the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), sanitation practices and data are collected and stored. That data has to be accessible and interpreted, however, in order for bakeries to make use of it. Only then can bakeries use the data to make operational decisions, said Randy Kohal, vice president of food safety and reliability at Nexcor Food Safety Technologies. 

“FSMA and other regulations require a proactive approach to food safety that ensures everything affecting food safety is documented and auditable,” he noted. “That said, documented data needs to be maintained in one place with the ability to be aggregated and measured. These pieces need to all work in tandem to achieve true oversight, transparency and risk mitigation.”

He pointed out that KLEANZ is Nexcor’s SaaS (Software as a Service) system that manages scheduling, executing and documenting all sanitation and food safety processes. It tracks scheduled tasks and developed completion metrics so that bakeries can see how their sanitation is improving and make decisions to facilitate that.

This article is an excerpt from the July 2024 issue of Baking & Snack. To read the entire feature on Food Safety & Sanitation, click here.