Cleaning, Sanitising and Disinfection of food preparation and  Processing area cleaning: Improving Food Safety and Operational Efficiency in Food Processing
Cleaning in the food industry is not an easy task. However, it is a critical step within food production since it is crucial to maintain and guarantee food safety. Understanding various soil challenges, why we clean and how detergents and disinfectants work is key to ensuring a safe, hygienic manufacturing environment.
So the big question remains: Why do we clean and disinfect?

•Prevent Transfer of Products/Ingredients: If a number of products are manufactured on the same machine, it is undesirable to cross-contaminate chemicals or alternate from one product to the next.
•Avoid Microbial Contamination: This can lead to a number of problems, reduced product quality, harm to health or even life threatening circumstances in some cases. Cleaning alone is no guarantee of decontamination, but it is a pre-requisite to disinfection.
•Ensure Disinfectant Efficiency: Soil impacts the effectiveness of a disinfectant. The less soil on the surface, the more effective the disinfect will be at reducing microbiological contamination.
•Improve Plant Efficiency: Soil contamination reduces the efficiency of equipment and the production process.
•Increase Safety: Facilities that are not cleaned effectively have more potential safety risks, like slips and falls, due to food waste on floors. Also, major incidents due to build up of soil in equipment can also occur.
•Impact Financial Implications: Reducing waste from spoilage can significantly extend the life of equipment and machinery.
•Minimize Legal Ramifications: Although it may not be common knowledge, there are often legal requirements for food facilities to clean surfaces and equipment to a specific standard.
•Boost Stakeholder Confidence: Finally the appearance of plant and premises is often overlooked but the psychological benefits and confidence gained from clean, hygienic equipment and tidy surroundings have a significant impact on both worker satisfaction and customer confidence.

Cleaning
Cleaning and disinfection should be considered as two discrete steps in the cleaning procedure. Cleaning is the complete removal of residues and soil from surfaces, leaving them visually clean so that subsequent disinfection will be effective. Without effective cleaning, disinfection will be compromised.

Detergents are used to remove soil from a surface. The soil a mixture of food waste and bacteria is on or attached to the surface of the processing equipment, floors or walls. The action of the detergent solution is to suspend this soil and bacteria mixture away from the surface and allow for it to be rinsed off to the drain. However, there are many soils found in the food industry and the cleaning procedure and detergent used in order to achieve the desired detergent action is different for each soil.

The most common soils carbohydrates like sugar, starch and cellulose are the easiest to remove. Proteins meat, milk and eggs are probably the most difficult because changes in heat and pH alter the structure of the protein and bind it to other molecules, increasing their tenacity and often rendering them insoluble. For example, while milk is soluble in water, if you over boil a pan of milk, the resulting milk soil becomes difficult to remove form the pan.

Fatty soils are not water-soluble and pose a greater challenge than carbohydrates. Here, it’s necessary to use alkaline cleaners and elevated temperatures above the melting point of the fat to achieve an efficient clean. Mineral salts the inorganic food soils lead to scale formation on equipment. Acidic cleaners are required to efficiently remove the scale.

You don’t need to look far for a clear example of improved operational efficiency and food safety. Golden Brown introduced a huge transformation project in 2015. We only have to see the four pillars and objectives of this project to understand its scope and importance, and the commitment Golden Brown Cleaning Services is showing to food safety for :

1. To guarantee safe and high quality products and service for our customer at an optimal cost ratio
2. To be an A+ company in terms of Cleaning and Sanitation
3. To standardise cleaning and sanitation throughout the Golden Brown
4. To support and stimulate improvements towards cleaning & sanitation.