Aging Facilities Face Dire Need for Proactive Food Safety Measures

Early in my career, I purchased a copy of “Engineering for Food Safety and Sanitation,” 1984, 1st edition, by Thomas J. Imholte. It provided an excellent foundation for a young engineer to understand the importance of hygienic design in food plant construction and how even the most minor detail matters.

Prior to that, the only food-related book I had read was Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle,” a fictional work about the early days of meat processing at the Chicago stockyards that influenced President Theodore Roosevelt to enact the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906, which initiated the modern era of food safety laws.

The subjects of food safety and food recalls have been around for a long time and are certainly at the top of mind from the headlines of the past year.

The first major national food recall occurred in 1920 when a botulism outbreak linked to improperly canned olives compelled the government to pull the product.

Why the history? As I visited various food manufacturing facilities this past year for site assessments concerning food safety and overall building systems reliability, I found that the common challenge was managing the decades of age affecting their structures and equipment.

Food manufacturers today must navigate difficult decisions as they allocate their capital improvement dollars. Food safety and employee safety investments must be at the top of the list, but pressures to be cost-competitive necessitate substantial funds to be allocated to efficiency and throughput improvement.

In Food Safety Magazine’s December 2024/January 2025 issue, Richard F. Steier shares important insights to include your actual facility and physical plant as a prerequisite program to your Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) plan in his article, Facilities Focus: Manage Your Physical Plant as a Prerequisite.

He writes:

How should a food processing facility be designed? Ideally, the plant and grounds should be designed to ensure safe and sanitary production of food, and the facility itself should be of durable design. The environment itself should be designed and maintained to minimize the potential for contamination of foods and beverages by microorganisms, including potential pathogens, as well as foreign material, pests, and chemicals.

Meeting these challenges depends upon the plant itself. (Among the important questions posed) to students when teaching HACCP are:

"How old is your plant?" and "Was the facility designed to be a food plant?"

The age of many food plants is surprising. When polling the students, most facilities tend to be between 40 and 60 years of age, with some over 100 years old. Many were not built to be food processing plants. The buildings once housed warehouses, mini-mall facilities, and even parking garages. With an older facility, it is absolutely imperative that the quality team conduct a detailed audit of the facility and identify potential problem areas. In other words, a risk assessment must be conducted of the entire operation. The team should then develop, document, and implement programs to monitor these areas and, hopefully, develop a documented improvement plan with a timeline. Having such a program is something that auditors appreciate seeing, as it demonstrates that the facility is conscious of problems and has plans to address them.

These words hit home immediately in my career, as the very first food plant I walked into four decades ago was a converted warehouse constructed with minimally insulated metal walls, insulation batting on processing area ceilings, minimal floor drains, no floor coatings, poor lighting and poor HVAC evidenced by dark walls and ceilings from smoke-induced stains.

Common Manufacturing Maladies

Fast forward to today. Although food companies have improved their attention to hygienic design and sensitivity to food safety, most food processing facilities are decades old.

These older facilities share common pain points:

• Compromised flooring. A combination of years of failed systems from incorrect floor coating applications and harsh chemicals has yielded excessive damage, separation, flaking, gaps and harborage locations for bacteria.
• Damaged Walls/Curbs. Years of abuse from powered equipment hitting curbs, warped Fiberglass Reinforced Panels (FRP) wall systems from moisture intrusion and improper installation, and caulking separation between wall/curb connections, all of which can compromise food safety.
• Suspended Ceiling Tile Damage. Non-walkable suspended ceiling tiles look great when first installed. However, they warp over time, allowing dirt and dust to accumulate between the frame and tile, thus presenting a constant struggle to prevent mold from growing. Keeping up with effective cleaning and replacement processes can be a daunting task. Often, today’s manufacturers are choosing walkable IMP ceilings and using the interstitial space to run most of their horizontal utility piping, thus eliminating those issues.
• End-of-Life Ammonia Systems. Many plants have ammonia refrigeration systems that are 30-plus years old. If not properly maintained with strict adherence to Process Safety Management (PSM) and Mechanical Integrity procedures, these systems are susceptible to compromised insulation and effects from the elements, such as hail and high wind.
• Antiquated Employee Welfare Spaces. The best indicator of how a restaurant operates is its restroom. Within a minute of entering a restroom, I know two things about the site management team: whether they understand food safety and whether they take pride in their establishment. Often, restrooms can be forgotten and still function. However, if they are not designed and maintained properly, they can be a source of contamination and a host of food safety issues.

The 2022 U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service’s survey of the food and beverage industry’s manufacturing industry reported that the United States is home to 42,708 food and beverage processing establishments. The average age is unknown, but having been in this business for 40 years, I can say anecdotally that more are older rather than newer.

So, what’s next?

Step 1: Create the Right Culture

At the core, these older plants need to adopt what former FDA Deputy Commissioner Frank Yiannis wrote on page 14 of his book, “Food Safety Culture Creating a Behavior-Based Food Safety Management System”: “Having a strong food safety culture is a choice. Ideally, the leaders of an organization will proactively choose to have a strong food safety culture because it’s the right thing to do. Safety is a firm value of the organization. Notice that I said, ‘It’s a value and not a priority.’ Priorities can change values should not.”

The culture of a food processing facility begins and ends with the site leadership team. It cannot be directed from the corporate office. The on-site leaders responsible for the lives of their teams and the safe processing of food must believe they own the plant culture. They must walk it every day, lead by example, and never compromise.

Step 2: Create the Right Process

Create a process to search and identify problem areas actively. This should be done at scheduled intervals and include a cross-functional team from Operations, Quality, Sanitation and Engineering. This should be considered a top activity within the organization and require participation.

Findings should be tracked on a Corrective Action log, and the status should be reviewed weekly. (Note: A KANBAN-type board can be used to ensure issues are being addressed thoroughly in a timely manner. Utilizing Root Cause analysis and 5WHY tools should also be incorporated.) The Environmental Monitoring program should be used to identify potential micro hot spots and prioritize accordingly.

Step 3: Create the Right Budget

Nothing will magically fix itself. For older plants to continue producing food safely, they must increase their capital spending for Food Safety initiatives. As stated earlier, 2024 saw millions of pounds of food recalled, hundreds of hospitalizations, and dozens of fatalities. Whatever processors spent on Food Safety last year, it needs to be more this year … and every year thereafter.

About the author: Jon Heussner is a member of 澳门足彩app’s team of Strategic Industry Advisors specializing in Food Manufacturing. He is HACCP- and Safe Quality Food (SQF)-certified and has more than 40 years of food engineering and operational experience with manufacturers such as Tyson, Conagra, Hain Celestial, Dean Foods, and Scoular.