Five Hygiene and Sanitation Trends in the Food Industry

Article By ANDREA TOLU Published September October 2023
Article Source: Five Hygiene and Sanitation Trends in the Food Industry - Quality Assurance & Food Safety (qualityassurancemag.com)

Sanitation and employee hygiene are nothing new, but looking at some of the trends around both might help you up your game.

Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in the print edition of QA under the headline "Clean Slate."

The issue of hygiene and sanitation in food production is as old as food production itself. It’s an ongoing battle against microbiological contamination that food businesses and regulators haven’t won yet, but have become considerably better at.

To keep you up to date with the current hygiene and sanitation trends in the food industry, we spoke with two experts: Will Eaton, vice president of marketing and sales at Meritech, a manufacturer of fully automated hand washing systems, and Steven Ardagh, CEO and founder of Eagle Protect, a supplier of gloves.

Staffing Challenges

A negative trend that Eaton has noticed is the impact of recruitment issues in the food industry on the consistency of hygiene and sanitation in production plants.

“We have customers that do onboarding and training daily, knowing that half of those they onboard and train won’t make it past seven days,” he said. “When that happens, they have to rehire and retrain, which leaves them with a gap in the sanitation protocols.”

But the problem is not limited to that gap, Eaton added. During those few days when new hires actually work at the plant, they are unlikely to comply faithfully with sanitation practices.

“If someone takes the job knowing that they might not be there for more than five days, are they paying attention?” he said. “Are they following the protocols? Do they believe they’re being paid enough to care?”

Higher Bar in Sanitation

A trend Ardagh has noticed is a stronger focus on hygiene and sanitation.

“As prominent food safety lawyer Shawn Stevens said recently, after the pandemic, the FDA and the FSIS were like bears coming out of two years of hibernation, eager to resume controls,” Ardagh said. “Their testing process has improved to a point where they’ll pick up things that until a few years ago they wouldn’t have been able to. A good example are the massive recalls of E. coli in ground beef that we’ve had in the last two or three years.”

This is setting the bar of standards higher for food companies, Ardagh said. With more chances of pathogens being found, they will have to be much more cognizant that if there’s a hygiene and sanitation issue at their plant, it’s more likely to come out.

The Human Factor in Hand Hygiene

As an expert in handwashing systems, Eaton said that hand hygiene in food plants is still facing long-standing challenges.

“Hand washing became popular in the 1840s, primarily for health care. And it’s the exact same today," Eaton said, noting hand washing is dependent on humans “applying chemicals in enough quantity for the right amount of time.”

He added that it’s not that food businesses are not trying to improve. Many of them have been rewriting corporate specifications and policies around hand hygiene standards. But then the challenge is to make sure that people are trained properly and rules are followed.

“I see companies trying different techniques,” he said. “Some hire people to sit in hygiene zones and watch staff to make sure they wash their hands. But they’re not running a stopwatch, and they’re not really making sure everyone’s doing the proper things. Others have installed lights of different colors at the sink, indicating when it’s time to rinse, lather, wash, etc. I’m also seeing companies incorporate [sensors] that let water run for 20 or 30 seconds instead of just two.”

Gloves Still a Blind Spot

Ardagh, whose company manufactures gloves, explained how gloves continue to be a potential source of contamination within the workplace. In October 2022, Eagle Protect published a five-year study conducted with microbiologist Barry Michaels, which analyzed 26,000 imported gloves from 26 different brands. The results, Ardagh said, were worrying.

“All gloves were FDA food compliant, some of them medical compliant. [According to the study], over 50% of them had indicators of fecal matter,” he said. “We found 216 different pathogens: E. coli, Salmonella, Listeria, molds, fungus, Staphylococcus, Streptococcus — you name it, it was on the gloves.”

Part of the issue is regulatory, he said: The FDA doesn’t require gloves to be clean or intact. The focus of compliance is centered around chemical migration.

The other big factor is that nobody checks gloves on arrival, Ardagh said. They’re just assumed to be clean.

But what turns gloves from a hygiene and sanitation tool into a microbiological hazard, Ardagh said, is that they’re a huge blind spot for people.

“Because they come into direct contact with food, gloves are defined by the FDA as utensils, same as cutting boards and knives. They are a zone 1 food safety item, and as such they should be tested and swabbed all the time,” he said. “The irony is we often see in food processing plants people wearing gloves swab everything except the glove itself to see if it’s contaminated.”

In addition to what’s on the gloves, Ardagh said, another traditional problem in the industry is what’s in them.

“We’ve had a case of a cannabis grower who had to issue a recall after the authorities found a carcinogenic compound in his products,” he said. “Test results showed that it came from the gloves.”

He said that we shouldn’t be trusting factories to be making the same glove they made last time they were audited, because price pressure is leading many of them to use different additives, fillers and chemicals that may alter the chemistry totally.

Considering this, a positive trend in the food industry is the gradual replacement of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) gloves with nitrile gloves.

As Ardagh explained, there are quite a few problems associated with PVC gloves that he sees. When they are manufactured or burned in landfills, they produce dioxins. Many of them also contain plasticizers — additives that make PVC flexible and soft enough to wear — that are often made with phthalates, toxic endocrine disruptors that can migrate to food, according to Ardagh. As a contamination prevention tool, PVC gloves are not that good either, he said.

“Studies done in the ’90s and the 2000s in the medical field showed that over 50% of vinyl gloves have holes and microtears before they are even put on,” he said.

Footwear

While hand hygiene practices are lagging, the interest in footwear sanitation is picking up. Eaton explained that the reason behind this stronger interest in footwear is the need to prevent contaminations with Listeria, which is one of those pathogens that travels very well on shoe soles.

“Until one or two years ago, a lot of food facilities weren’t really addressing footwear,” Eaton said. “We would often see employees were allowed to come in wearing street shoes — no captive footwear program or sanitation measures were in place. But that’s changing rapidly. We’re having more and more conversations around implementing the right type of footwear and preventive measures to ensure pathogens are not being transmitted around the facility on feet.”