Food manufacturers are tidying up as the industry shifts from prescriptive sanitary standards to performance-based ones.
"Manufacturers must adopt a much more holistic view of plant sanitation, from how ingredients are delivered to the shipment of finished goods," said Steve Gray, vice president of business development with Fort Wayne, Ind.-based construction engineering firm Shambaugh & Son. According to Gray,this includes not only rethinking the sanitation of processing systems, but of all the building systems, including electrical fixtures and duct work. A number of improvements in recent years in both automation technology and federal sanitary standards are helping operators develop a plant-wide view of sanitation.