With FSMA in place and many processors seeking GFSI certifications, effective cleaning and sanitation are more important than ever. Processors are concentrating on good sanitation practices, and they are getting help from automated equipment that can produce verifiable results and records, but the human element still remains—because not all sanitation steps can easily be automated.
A 2011 Canadian report published by the Food Processing Human Resources Council, “Trends and New Technologies Affecting the Work Performed by Sanitation Workers in the Food Processing Industry,” pointed out a common problem for small and medium-sized food processors: Sanitation workers in the food industry perform dangerous and tedious work with many unique challenges.1 Most cleaning and sanitation work is performed on night shifts in miserable and often unsafe industrial environments. The night shift workers typically receive less pay than others, receive little training and—because of the time they perform their cleaning operations—receive little if any oversight by senior management. Unfortunately, these often high-turnover jobs tend to attract the least-skilled people who may not understand that appropriate cleaning and sanitation are necessary to make safe food products.