FOOD SAFETY INFORMATION Decontamination of food industry cleaning brushware – a matter of hygienic design DEBRA SMITH - GLOBAL HYGIENE SPECIALIST VIKAN A/S, RÆVEVEJ 1, 7800 SKIVE, DENMARK INTRODUCTION The importance of using hygienically designed cleaning equipment is recognised by both the Food Safety System Certification (FSSC 22000)[1] and the British Retail Consortium (BRC)[2]. Incorporated within FSSC 22000, section 11.2 of ISO/TS 22002-1:2009, ‘Prerequisite programmes on food safety -- Part 1: Food manufacturing’ states, with regard to cleaning and sanitising agents and tools, that: ‘Tools and equipment shall be of hygienic design’. The BRC Global Standard for Food Safety, issue 7, states (in Section 4.11.6) the requirement for cleaning equipment to be ‘hygienically designed’. But what determines whether a piece of cleaning equipment is of good hygienic design? and what impact do these requirement have on the food industry? Thanks to organisations such as the European Hygienic Engineering & Design Group (EHEDG), many food manufacturers already appreciate the benefits of using hygienically designed production equipment. Equipment and components designed with hygiene in mind are quicker and easier to clean, which minimises the risk of microbiolgical, chemical and physical contamination, as well as pest infestation. This in turn maximises food safety and quality, reduces the risk of expensive product rejection or recall, and minimises food waste. However, when it comes to the equipment used to clean the food production environment and production equipment, the need for good hygienic design of the cleaning tools is often not considered appropriately. Typically, cleaning equipment is used over large surface areas and therefore is capable of collecting (and subsequently spreading) contamination. There may be an expectation that any contamination collected by the cleaning equipment is subsequently removed as part of the cleaning process. However, unpublished data, generated by a UK Government funded study which collected 10,000 Listeria swab samples from high care and high risk food factories, and analysed by Campden BRI (CBRI), showed that 47% of the cleaning equipment sampled, were positive for this organism (personal comment Holah, 2015). This data was later used by CBRI to establish guidance on ‘Effective microbiological sampling of food processing areas’[3], and gave rise to the concept of cleaning equipment as a major ‘collection’ point for the isolation of pathogens. Whether this observation was due to poor hygienic practices or to the poor hygienic design of the cleaning equipment (or both) is unknown. However, investigations conducted by Vikan indicate that much of the cleaning equipment currently used in the food Vikan A/S - Department of Research & Development 01Copyright © 2015 Vikan A/S · All Rights Reserved
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