Food plant cleanup has come a long way in the past 40 years. When I first began working in the food industry, cleaning was performed during the night shift and occasionally by the lowest-paid employees in a food plant. No one wanted to be assigned to the cleanup crew, and its task was often deemed a necessary evil. In fact, I once worked for an individual who stated in a staff meeting, “We do not need to worry about cleaning because we cook our products.”
Thankfully, this attitude was not ubiquitous back then. At the time, most processors understood cleaning needed to be done to protect the quality and safety of their products. And, if the plant was processing meat and poultry, it had to be clean or it simply wouldn’t be able to operate the next day. Having a USDA FSIS inspector deem a piece of equipment unclean and tagging it NR (noncompliance record) meant staff had to wait until the unit was cleaned to the inspector’s satisfaction.