Food manufacturers understand the importance of sanitary design to minimize the risk of contamination, but unfortunately, this awareness does not always result in effective implementation. 

Specifically, hygienic zoning is often overlooked as a way to create barriers against cross-contamination by managing the flow of traffic and materials through a facility. If your Food Safety Plan has identified any areas of high food safety risk, consider establishing hygienic zones to help meet current good manufacturing practices (cGMPs) and help prevent a contamination incident. 

Can You Afford to Ignore Hygienic Zoning?

One of the reasons a facility owner may resist implementing hygienic zoning is the cost, especially if a retrofit is required. It’s also a hassle to temporarily suspend production and create physical barriers and transitions between low-risk and high-risk zones. Consider, however, the potential cost of failing to properly prevent the introduction of contaminants (particularly in a zone that follows the final kill step if your process includes one).

If a contamination issue is caught while the product is still in process, losses may be minimal, but it will still involve some product loss, stoppage for cleaning, and possibly reworking of the process steps to ensure it does not happen again.

If a contaminated product makes it out of your plant, you’re at risk of needing to conduct a recall, which generally costs millions of dollars¹ as you track down products and get them returned, not to mention the time spent working with regulatory authorities, process downtime, loss of revenue and reputational damage.

Think of hygienic zoning as an extra level of insurance against a considerably more costly product recall.

Hygienic zoning helps manage the risk of contamination by dividing a food processing facility into areas in which different hygiene levels apply and ensuring that products flow only from levels of basic hygiene to levels of higher hygiene. Image courtesy of VAA.

Top 10 Tips for Successful Hygienic Zoning

Hygienic zoning doesn’t need to be complicated, but it can be challenging to know where to start. Here are some tips to navigate the implementation of hygienic zones at your facility. 

1. Focus on the factory environment. It may help you to recognize that you won’t need to build the zones throughout your entire facility – only in the manufacturing area and possibly in adjacent areas. Using your Food Safety or Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) plan, you can literally map out what types of contaminants are most likely to occur and where. (The FDA² and USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service³ offer resources assisting small- and medium-size food manufacturers to develop Food Safety and/or HACCP plans.) Then you can focus on those high-risk areas for potential hygienic zoning.

2. Look for easy wins. Retrofitting can be expensive, but there may be small improvements you can make cost effectively. For example, if the air supply of your HVAC system is introducing potentially contaminated air in a high-risk area, re-routing the ductwork and moving the supply vent may solve the problem. Or, maybe you need to replace a traditional wall (made with drywall and wooden studs) with an insulated metal panel (IMP). Perhaps additional hand-washing stations are needed. Small fixes can make a significant difference.

3. Go beyond cGMPs. CGMPs represent the minimum regulatory requirements around appropriate personal hygienic practices, design and construction of a food plant, maintenance of plant grounds, plant equipment, sanitary operations, facility sanitation, and production and process controls during the production of food, etc. Hygienic zoning provides a planned approach for not only meeting cGMP regulations but exceeding them, ensuring the highest food safety standards.

4. Invest in training. It is critical for everyone entering the plant to understand how to navigate hygienic zones and why it is important. This includes all personnel as well as contractors and vendors. Design or purchase different training modules that offer the appropriate training for each of these parties and level of employee.

5. Simplify steps to ensure compliance. Employees are likely to disregard rules that are unnecessarily complicated or seem redundant. Tools like color coding, barrier railings, and foam sprays on thresholds to sanitize feet are easy to implement and to follow.

6. Monitor and maintain hygienic zones. Make sure maintenance staff understand how to clean high-risk areas and encourage reporting of any repairs needed.

7. Be consistent with corporate policy. If it’s company policy to implement hygienic zones, ensure consistency in every plant. 

8. Include food safety personnel in planning. Your Preventive Controls Qualified Individual (PCQI) and your food safety team should be integral in process planning. They will provide valuable insight and can help prevent budgetary surprises or the need for retrofitting to accommodate hygienic zoning down the road.

9. Plan ahead. Retrofitting is difficult and expensive, so if you are planning new construction, proactively include hygienic zoning. 

10, Embrace the “culture” of hygienic zoning. Hygienic zoning is not a one-person job. It’s a team effort that will only be successful if it is built into an organization’s culture and reinforced from the top down. 

Where to Find Help

Since many food and beverage manufacturing plants were built before hygienic zoning was a common consideration, both seasoned and inexperienced employees may be unfamiliar with the concept. In addition to your own food safety team, there are many resources available to help you plan and implement hygienic zoning^4,5,6. 

References

¹https://www.food-safety.com/articles/2542-recall-the-food-industrys-biggest-threat-to-profitability 

²https://www.fda.gov/food/food-safety-modernization-act-fsma/food-safety-plan-builder

³https://www.fsis.usda.gov/inspection/compliance-guidance/small-very-small-plant-guidance

⁴https://www.food-safety.com/articles/6361-hygienic-zoning-in-food-manufacturing-factories

⁵https://www.food-safety.com/articles/5902-hygienic-room-air-handling-in-food-processing-factories

⁶Hygienic Zoning in Frozen Food Facilities, published by the American Frozen Food Institute (AFFI)