In food production, not all people are created equal—at least when it comes to the hygienic clearance of people entering your food factory. According to Tom Waters, one of Europe’s leading experts in hygienic building design, meticulous management of the people flow in your food factory is pivotal for your hygienic success – and in turn your business.
The integration of hygienic and non-hygienic personnel flows in food production facilities is a critical challenge that requires painstaking planning and design.
If you ask Tom Waters, poor people management is one of the biggest threads to safe food production. According to him, ensuring that different categories of personnel—production, maintenance, laboratory staff, and visitors—do not compromise the hygienic integrity of food processing areas is paramount.
Differentiating Personnel Categories
Working with different categories of people in your factory is not a novel phenomenon in modern food production facilities. Managing these diverse flows comes from the need to accommodate a range of interactions within the facility while preventing any potential contamination of the end product.
While production workers, who are typically in direct contact with food products, require the most stringent hygiene protocols, often they are so accustomed to working with hygiene that they are rarely of the biggest concern.
In contrast, maintenance and laboratory personnel, who may only occasionally enter production areas, pose quite unique risks due to the tools and equipment they carry, which could harbor contaminants. As they do not necessarily walk the factory floors every day, they should be considered more like guests in the hygienic zones.
”I suppose you could call them transient people; maintenance people coming in and out of the facility, or laboratory personnel who have to access and move around the facility to take samples,” Waters explain and continues:
“They would not necessarily be in the same place, but they're moving from area to area. […] How that is managed is as [they] go through the facility is an important consideration. […] What you bring across hygiene barriers really needs to be thought through.”
Thus, maintenance and lab staff often need more rigorous sanitation protocols to minimize contamination risks.
In addition, the transient personnel could also use color-coded tools and uniforms to differentiate between those used in high-care and low-care areas. Tools can be sterilized using UV light before entry into high-care zones, and staff can follow strict decontamination procedures, including changing into sanitized clothing and passing through air showers.
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Establishing Clear Pathways and Protocols
To effectively manage these varied flows, facilities must establish clear pathways and strict protocols.
Entry and exit points for all personnel categories should be designed to ensure that transitions between different hygiene zones are controlled and monitored. This involves setting up designated changing rooms and wash stations where employees can put on protective clothing and sanitize before entering or after leaving sensitive areas.
“People ultimately are a source of contamination potential in a high-care area. So, the less people you have in that area, the better. And that again, kicks into efficiency because then less people have to go through a full gowning procedure. So, you minimize the number of people who have to enter,” Waters adds.
In a state-of-the-art meat processing facility, clear pathways should be marked with different colors on the floor, guiding personnel to appropriate hygiene zones. The facility could use automated gates that only unlock after an employee has completed handwashing and gowning protocols, which are verified by intelligent video monitoring. This system could ensure no one bypasses critical sanitation steps.
As regulations and consumer demands tighten, advanced facilities may want to incorporate automated systems to ensure compliance in an attempt to significantly reduce human error and ensure consistent adherence to hygiene standards.
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Specialized Visitor Routes
While lab and maintenance personnel does indeed carry extra risk, factory visitors pose entirely new threats, thus managing visitor flows adds another layer of complexity.
Visitors, including management and educational groups, often lack daily—even weekly—exposure to the facility’s hygiene practices. This makes their compliance even more challenging. In many cases, factory visits with external stakeholders may bring people who have never even entered a hygienic production zone before.
In other words, the risk cannot be underestimated.
A good way of mitigating the contamination risk posed by visitors—be they top management or externals—is having specialized visitor routes that allow for observation without contact with high-risk areas. According to Waters, such routes should be clearly marked and physically separate from production zones, ideally with viewing galleries or enclosed walkways. This approach not only maintains hygiene standards but also showcases the facility's operations in a transparent and safe fashion.
“Very often, [management] is bringing in educational groups, for example, to explain their product or show what they're doing. And that needs to be very much factored in [when designing a food factory], because very often you're looking at dedicated visitor routes and visitor corridors and that needs to be kept separate from the hygiene areas,” Waters says.
A solution could be implemented an enclosed walkway for visitors running above the production floor. Visitors can observe the entire production process through glass panels without entering the actual production zones—and be assured by the walkway itself that the factory handles hygiene professionally.
Applying Smart Facility Layout and Technology
Addressing the integration of hygienic and non-hygienic personnel flows requires a deep understanding of the types of interactions within the facility and the potential risks each interaction presents.
It demands a strategic approach to facility layoutand movement protocols, ensuring that every person within the factory contributes to maintaining the highest standards of food safety.
The layout might include separate entrances for staff working in different zones, with dedicated changing areas and handwashing stations strategically placed to streamline movement while maintaining strict hygiene controls.
It might include using state-of-the-art technology to monitor sanitation procedures or using RFID badges (Radio Frequency IDentification) to track employee movements and ensure compliance with hygiene protocols. While both may seem like excessive employee surveillance, the purpose is entirely the opposite. It is to empower the individual employee to raise hygienic standards and to help them avoid critical mistakes.
“[Hygienic design] really has to be driven by the quality people, but you need to get the operations people brought in as well. And the operations people and the quality people need to come together with the design team to define what the requirements are. Because operations and quality aren't necessarily conflicting, but there can be a little bit of a pull in different directions,” Waters concludes.
All in all, continuous improvement and adaptability are crucial. As new technologies emerge and regulations evolve, facilities must remain flexible and ready to implement changes that enhance hygiene and efficiency. Regular training and audits can help ensure all personnel remain compliant with the latest standards and practices.