Picture this: a busy dairy facility, where hundreds of employees navigate through a maze of hygiene zones. Each step they take is a potential vector for contamination, and the efficiency of their movements directly impacts the safety and quality of the final product.
In the high-stakes environment of food production, the slightest misstep in managing people flow can lead to catastrophic consequences. For managers and food professionals, understanding and mitigating the pitfalls in facility design and people flow is not trivial—it’s essential.
In an interview with industry expert, Tom Waters, we uncovered four of the most significant pitfalls to look out for when designing and running a food factory. In this article, we’ll discuss them one by one—let’s begin with something that is easily missed: employees having breaks.
Pitfall 1: Getting People to and From Break Areas in Food Factories
One of the most significant challenges in food production facilities is managing the flow of people to and from break areas, especially in high-risk environments.
High-care zones require stringent gowning procedures. They often involve multiple layers of protective clothing, which is time-consuming and difficult to handle, and the need to de-gown and re-gown for breaks interrupts workflow and poses a risk of contamination if not managed properly.
“When you take facilities with a reasonably high level of gowning required […] and where there is a microbiological risk to a product, they tend to be the ones with the biggest challenges because of what people have to move into their work areas,” Tom Waters explains.
This encapsulates the core issue: balancing the need for hygiene with the operational efficiency of getting workers to and from their break areas without compromising safety.
To address this, facilities must be strategically designed with well-placed break areas that minimize travel distance while maintaining hygiene standards.
This can be achieved by positioning break rooms close to high-care zones, yet ensuring they are sufficiently isolated to prevent contamination. Additionally, investing in automated gowning and de-gowning stations can streamline the process, reducing time lost and maintaining hygiene protocols.
This careful planning not only boosts efficiency but also helps in maintaining the rigorous hygiene standards essential in food production.
Pitfall 2: Maintenance Access to the Food Factory
Maintenance activities in high-care areas are another significant challenge because it often involves tools and equipment that can introduce contaminants into sensitive areas.
The contamination potential from brought-in tools makes it crucial to manage how and where the maintenance activities take place. Ensuring maintenance access without compromising hygiene is a critical design consideration.
Waters highlights this issue: “We try and keep maintenance access to a minimum. For instance, with air handling units and utilities, we try to keep those under ‘standard care’ and accessible from ‘standard care’, so that the maintenance workers don’t have to go through a gowning procedure.”
This strategy minimizes the risk of contamination by restricting maintenance activities to areas that do not require stringent hygiene controls, thus reducing the need for maintenance personnel to gown up.
Implementing this approach involves thoughtful facility design. By placing essential maintenance equipment in standard care zones, you ensure that routine checks and repairs do not disrupt the hygiene protocols of high-care areas.
Additionally, establishing strict protocols for cleaning and sanitizing tools before and after use can further safeguard against contamination. By minimizing the interaction between maintenance activities and high-care areas, facilities can maintain high hygiene standards without compromising operational efficiency.
READ ALSO: Advanced People Flow: Managing Hygienic and Non-Hygienic Personnel in Food Factories
Pitfall 3: Indoor Roof Access Through the Facility
Avoiding this may seem logical, but accessing the roof from inside the factory is something very common, even if fraught with potential pitfalls.
Roofs are hotspots for contamination, housing everything from bird droppings to environmental debris, all of which can easily be tracked back into production areas if proper precautions are not taken. Managing access to these areas without compromising the hygienic integrity of the facility is essential—also because the areas are now often being used as part of the facility’s sustainability strategy:
“Today, people are putting solar panels on the roof, so they need to access those. So, it's never a case that you're not going to be accessing it,” says Waters and highlights the inevitability of roof access for maintenance and the challenges it poses.
Hence, ensuring that roof access does not lead to contamination within production areas requires strategic planning and design.
Facilities should be designed with external access points for roof maintenance, such as dedicated staircases or ladders, to prevent maintenance personnel from entering production zones.
Additionally, roofs should be regularly inspected and cleaned to prevent the buildup of contaminants. By establishing strict protocols for roof access and maintenance, facilities can mitigate the risk of contamination and ensure that production areas remain hygienically secure.
READ ALSO: 10 Critical Steps to Futureproof Your Food Factory
Pitfall 4: Hygienic Employee Culture
Now, we’ve visited three essential design pitfalls to avoid when building and running a food factory. But what about the employees?
The people entering the facilities every day effectively carry with them the greatest risk, thus creating and maintaining a hygienic employee culture is critical in food production facilities. This is true for your regular staff, but maybe especially for factories relying on transient labor.
Transient workers may not be as familiar with stringent hygiene protocols, increasing the risk of non-compliance and ensuring that all employees adhere to hygiene standards is essential for maintaining the safety and quality of the production environment.
“There are factories out there where there's large numbers of people and they are relying on transient labor, so they have to bring in casual labor to cope at peaks or they're just kind of big numbers. So typically, in that scenario, it's important that there are controls put in, and you would be a little bit more prescriptive in your design,” Waters notes and underscores the importance of having robust procedures and simple-to-follow employee flow design to manage the hygiene practices of transient workers.
Implementing comprehensive training programs for all employees, including temporary and seasonal workers, is essential. Regular training sessions, coupled with visual reminders such as posters and digital displays, can reinforce the importance of hygiene practices.
Facilities can also employ technology to monitor compliance, such as gates that require handwashing verification before granting access to production areas.
By creating a strong hygiene culture and ensuring continuous education, food production facilities can maintain high standards of safety and quality.
Hygienic Facility Design is a Numbers Game
Evidently, navigating the pitfalls of designing and running a modern food production facility is full of challenges. As Tom Waters aptly summarizes, “Those are probably the key challenges, we've come across – but it really is a numbers game. It's about trying to minimize the amount of movement that the maximum number of people are making.” By understanding and addressing these pitfalls—whether it’s optimizing break area locations, minimizing maintenance access, ensuring safe roof access, or creating hygienic culture—food production facilities can enhance both safety and efficiency.