Back to blog 12/17/2021

Food Sanitation for Manufacturing Facilities: Going an Extra Mile with Your Integrated Facilities Maintenance Program

Contributed by Cheryl Costello, National Sales Executive

The COVID-19 pandemic compelled various manufacturing plants to scrutinize their maintenance, hygiene, and sustainability practices in order to improve them and ensure that cleanliness and employee health were always prioritized. Similarly, it became necessary to continue plant operations with greater emphasis on developing stronger and stricter food sanitation practices as a preventative approach for all types of surface contamination. As a result, food manufacturing facilities faced challenges not just in keeping their environment clean and operating productively, but also in remaining compliant with a wide range of new local and federal regulations improvised during and after the pandemic-driven lockdown. In order to resume business operations effectively and efficiently in the ‘new normal’ work world, manufacturing facilities heavily relied on the services of outsourced partners for a variety of backend support functions. However, it was deemed beneficial to work with service providers with the capacity to deliver integrated solution to make it easy to manage and communicate with a single-vendor approach. Subsequently, experienced facilities maintenance service providers were able to expand scope of their existing program with integrated services to include food sanitation requirements for their manufacturing customers.

Food manufacturing facilities that opted to allocate the food sanitation function to their integrated facilities maintenance partners began with a comprehensive evaluation of both, the production and non-production areas followed by revisiting the existing scope of work. Other key steps for incorporating food sanitation practices into the integrated janitorial and facilities maintenance program include:

• Assessment of specific surfaces to determine which ones are frequently touched and have higher risk of contamination.
• Design a strategy to increase maintenance and sanitation protocol frequency for identified high-risk areas and surfaces at the plant.
• Selection of most appropriate, sustainable, and safe products and chemicals to ensure no surfaces are left with any grease, food debris, or chemical residue at any given time.
• Specialized employee training program is also one of the most important steps that impacts the performance, productivity, and efficiency of the integrated cleaning, maintenance, and food sanitation program for any manufacturing customer

Diversified Maintenance delivers custom solutions to a wide range of industries including manufacturing plants. With elevated concerns and examination from various facilities, the Diversified teams are working consistently in maintaining adequate hygiene and sanitation standards for food manufacturing facilities. The existing integrated services programs have been revisited to incorporate food sanitation best practices to ensure effective results and compliance in all production and non-production areas. To learn more about the dynamics of an integrated facilities maintenance that includes quality services for food sanitation at your facility, send me a note at: Cheryl Costello ccostello@diversifiedm.com.