Hygienic design is a critical component of food and beverage plants even in the best of times. Add in an ongoing pandemic, and the questions of employee safety and virus control add another layer of complexity.

In this month’s episode of the Food Engineering Podcast, Duane Grassmann, corporate hygienist, Nestlé USA and Canada, shares insights on best practices in hygienic design, understanding how to evaluate your facility’s needs and implementing a process to ensure cleaning, sanitation, food safety and employee safety are all manageable goals.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. The full podcast can be heard by clicking the play button below.

Casey Laughman, Food Engineering (CL): To get started, can we talk a little bit about what hygienic design is? What do food and beverage processors need to know about hygienic design and how it fits into their overall design and operation strategies?

Duane Grassmann, Nestlé (DG): Wow, how much time do we have? This is a big question. What do you need to know about hygienic design?Everything. And how does it play into the strategy? It does, and in a huge way.

So nobody can know everything about hygienic design. But it’s having a good network that’ll help you understand what the design flaws are, and what makes a good hygienic design. I think it’s really important to talk about ... it’s like a teeter-totter. Cost of ownership versus initial cost. So if we’re buying better hygienically designed equipment, it typically costs a little more. But the cost of ownership goes down because it’s easier to clean, easier to maintain, it tends to run better.

So, unfortunately, engineers are oftentimes rewarded for speed and cost. The fastest they can get it done at the lowest possible cost, and sometimes that results in poor hygienic design decisions. So incorporating hygienic design into those projects takes time and a lot of times, costs more. Those are things that the engineers are not rewarded for, so it’s a kind of a teeter-totter.

Now, how do you know what kind of hygienic design you need? Well, getting experts involved is a really good way and using a checklist. I’m a big proponent of checklists. There’s a couple of good ones out there. The American Meat Association has a good hygienic design checklist. The Consumer Brands Association has some equipment and facilities designed checklists that I really like, at consumerbrandsassociation.org. So go to their website, and you can find their equipment design and facility design checklists; they’re really good.

CL: Right now, obviously, what is still top of mind for everyone is the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and how that has affected food operations, how it’s affected society in general. So how has that changed the thinking around hygienic design? Or has it changed the thinking around hygienic design? Are people now thinking, “Hey, this is something we need to do to help guard against future outbreaks,” or things like that?

DG: This is such a huge question. I’ve seen a lot of smart people doing things in factories that don’t always make sense. A lot of things that might introduce new risks. So new risks, all the plexiglass shielding. Plexiglass is a brittle plastic, it can become foreign material really quickly. It’s also something that’s difficult to mount and suspend and support in a way that is hygienically designed. So lots of sandwich materials; it’s a lot more surfaces. And of course, somebody is always going to take a scratch pad to that plexiglass and make it suddenly not something you can see through.

We’ve done a lot of necessary things, but we haven’t thought them through real well about the hygienic design of those. Common spaces are the ones that really make me nervous. So how often should we be sanitizing the tables in our breakrooms? How often should we be sanitizing all the surfaces in a locker room or a bathroom? You know, it’s sanitized until the next person contaminates it. So what’s the right frequency? And I’m not sure that those are the best methods to help us keep our employees from getting sick.

But viruses are really difficult. They’re difficult to combat. It’s a lot of education—there’s a lot of messaging going on. You know, wash your hands, cover your nose and mouth when you sneeze and cough, and just common sense type things. And to keep everybody aware of it so that they can do their part. We’ll do what we can to sanitize at the frequency that’s right. But I think it’s going to take everybody working together on this.

CL: As we look at day-to-day operations in a food and beverage plant, how do you implement these hygienic design principles? What are the key areas that you look at and say, “OK, we need to make sure that we’re following these steps”? Is it cleaning and sanitation only? Or is there more to it than that?

DG: OK, this is multi-tiered. So we want to incorporate hygienic design during the design of the project. So some marketing guy says, “Hey, I want to make a pizza sandwich.” All right. So right about then, we gotta start even having a discussion about, “What kind of product am I running? What kind of speed I need to run at? What are the ingredients and the concerns around compatibility?” So some ingredients stain; some ingredients are highly acidic or are really hard on equipment. Lots of things like that. Is it going to be chilled, ambient, frozen? You know, there’s lots of different things that we start talking about, that’s when we got to start thinking about the hygienic design. So during the design phase.

And then, so we spend all this money and do all this really wonderful work to get the best possible equipment and line setup and accessibility around the line, and we’ve got this, you know, shiny process line on the hill. It’s gorgeous. And then we hire the lowest cost installers to put it in. And nothing ever goes wrong there. Yes, it does. So we shouldn’t look at it during the design phase, we should look at it during the installation phase as well. And then we’re going to look at it one more time, as if that wasn’t enough, cleaning validations. FE