And how you can address them at your facility.
By Rich Walsh, PhD, Senior Staff Scientist, Ecolab
Safe, delicious baked goods begin with the basics: high-quality ingredients prepared in a clean and sanitary setting. But even in diligently run industrial baking environments, persistent misconceptions can undermine essential food safety and product quality. Without intending to, these facilities can allow microorganisms and residual soils to impact the safety and efficiency of their operations – not because they’re negligent, but simply because they believe that they have no other choice, or they are unaware of advances made to support and improve their specific industry.
That’s overly limited thinking: A better, safer approach to industrial baking is possible. I’ve been helping industrial bakeries improve their cleaning and sanitation protocols for more than 18 years. Here are three of the most common misconceptions/encounter in my work.
Misconception #1:
“Our final product is cooked at high temperatures, which eliminates the common food safety risks associated with other types of food and beverage facilities.”
Yes, most bacteria are killed at temperatures exceeding 74°Celsius (165°F). But don’t mistake this biological reality for a comprehensive approach to food safety in baking environments.
“The risk of contamination with Salmonella and/or Listeria can only be controlled, not fully eliminated. But too often, taking a ‘business as usual’ approach to pathogen control leaves industrial bakeries with persistent cleaning and sanitation gaps that can expose them to unnecessary risks.”
Dr. Rich Walsh, Senior Staff Scientist, Ecolab
The truth is that several food safety risks persist, even if the food is subjected to high temperatures during preparation. Cross-contamination during handling can reintroduce contaminants onto finished goods. Neglected environmental risks can encourage the spread of pathogens like Salmonella and Listeria. And pest-related contamination is not addressed in the baking process.
Luckily, all of these risks can be mitigated through a robust cleaning and sanitation program. To improve existing protocols, begin by identifying harborage and niche ‘hotspots’ within your operation that may be difficult to clean and sanitize. You’ll find them everywhere: floor drains, overhead structures, cracks in floors and walls, hard-to-reach equipment components, hollow conveyor rollers; the list goes on and on.
Once you’ve identified these hotspots, work with production teams to devise a Master Sanitation Plan. This may look like more frequent cleaning in certain areas, but it should also include frequent environmental testing that flags little problems and gives you a chance to prevent their evolution into big problems.
Misconception #2
“Water is essential to cleaning and sanitation processes; therefore, there’s no getting around water-related risks.”
For cleaning, water is an extraordinary substance, as it can act as a solvent, it can be heated to help liquify and move fats or oils, it is residue-free (hardness level notwithstanding), it is very practical for safety considerations, to mention just a few attributes. With such versatility, it’s nearly impossible to fully eliminate the role of water in cleaning and sanitation. However, there are proven and effective application strategies you can employ to vastly reduce water-related microbial risks within your facility.
As much as possible, prevent moisture from being introduced into dry areas. If moisture is a necessity for cleaning, develop procedures to control the path it takes throughout your facility, with special emphasis on avoiding practices that lead to moisture buildup in harborage areas that can shelter and foster bacterial growth.
In essence: if it’s dry, keep it dry. No more defaulting to hosing down equipment just because it’s an easy cleaning method. New product offerings from Ecolab, such as Dry-San Trio or CSD15, help to minimize and control water application and eliminate rinses between cleaning and sanitization steps. Investing in dry cleaning chemistries means soils can be safely broken down without a rinse step. These chemistries tend to deliver value above and beyond food safety: because they contribute to the streamlining of cleaning and sanitation processes, they often help boost uptime and lower costs related to equipment dry times from residual water used in cleaning, as well as energy use, as they are ready-to-use products and do not rely on high-temperature water for the cleaning.
The key to enforcing these process improvements is approaching water management as a cultural mindset. From operators to supervisors to business leaders, all team members should have a collective culture around the mandate to drive water out of operations as much as possible.
Misconception #3
“There’s no way to fully eliminate the risk of Salmonella, Listeria, and other non-public health organisms such as yeasts and molds. The control strategies we’ve been using for years are as good as it’s going to get.”
This part is true: The risk of contamination with Salmonella and/or Listeria can only be controlled, not fully eliminated. But too often, taking a ‘business as usual’ approach to pathogen control leaves industrial bakeries with persistent cleaning and sanitation gaps that can expose them to unnecessary risks. One of the greatest but frequently overlooked risks stems from outside the facility: raw ingredients. Salmonella can survive for months under the right conditions and can infect someone with a dose as low as 15-20 cells. This threat must be met with a spirit of continuously improving cleaning and sanitation processes, so as to minimize the risk of fostering the microbes in the first place and potentially resulting in contamination in or on the product package. By reviewing a supplier’s sanitation practices and reviewing a facility’s own sanitation practices while storing raw materials before use, the risks can be identified and minimized as much as possible.
Making sure the good manufacturing practices set in place are airtight is key: control traffic by segregating and limiting access to high-risk areas; place handwashing stations strategically to prevent cross-contamination; adopt a cross-functional approach to sanitary design to ensure that key equipment purchasing decisions are informed by sanitary design principles. Define the reasons for facility organization and policies, and back them up with data to validate performance, as well as lending itself to an ongoing verification program to demonstrate that the validation is being adhered to.
The environmental monitoring program should also be strengthened. Technology and expert analysis can be leveraged to create a heat map of high-risk areas. Every team member should have easy access to escalation procedures in the event of nonconformance, ensuring that further testing takes place to vector out and locate the source of contamination.
Thwarting Listeria, Salmonella, or spoilage organisms is very much a battle against an unseen foe. But with the right processes, systematic and appropriate application of cleaning and sanitizing chemistries, and insights gleaned from a robust environmental monitoring program, a baking facility can dramatically reduce the risk of contamination and set itself on a path to continuous improvement and the best quality product possible.
Looking forward: The right approach begins with the right mindset
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to cleaning and sanitation in industrial baking. Every company, every facility, every process comes with its own unique requirements. But there are useful frameworks that industrial bakeries can use to triage their challenges and formulate their approaches. I like to recommend the 4×4 Sanitation Model, which breaks down the four key factors that shape a cleaning and sanitation solution:
+ Mechanical action: The physical force required to remove soils or contaminants
+ Time: How long it takes for a chemical solution to work (contact time) or how long it takes to complete a cleaning and sanitation process
+ Chemistry: Matching each cleaning and sanitation challenge with an optimized chemical solution
+ Temperature: Tweaking, optimizing, or making a given process safer by altering the temperature.
Industrial bakeries that do not routinely review their cleaning and sanitation programs run the risk of finding their fail point the hard way, either with severely diminished shelf-lives due to spoilage organisms, or a worst-case scenario of having a product test positive for a pathogenic organism, which is publicly disclosed. By addressing the above misconceptions and preparing and enacting a Master Sanitation Plan, industrial bakeries can chart a course for more reliable hygiene, more consistently high-quality products and better business.
About Rich Walsh
Dr. Rich Walsh has over 15 years’ experience enhancing food safety for the food processing industry. He completed his Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry from Iowa State University and holds B.A. degrees in Chemistry and Biochemistry from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
In addition to developing innovations in antimicrobials for Ecolab’s Food and Beverage Division, he provides field support for the application of antimicrobials by consultation, on-site auditing and best practice application, and seminars on cleaning and sanitation as it relates to food safety in food production. Dr. Walsh works with Ecolab customers to provide antimicrobial performance assessments on customer products, to assist in optimizing operating parameters and minimizing waste. He routinely serves as an Ecolab representative at industry association meetings focused on best practice policies for food safety, and with members of industry, academia, and government agencies, served on a focus group tasked with providing validation guidelines for FSMA compliance for the produce industry, and has authored several peer-reviewed articles on the topic of antimicrobials as applied to food, as well as contributions to industry journals for establishing best practices in food safety.