Facility and Equipment Design Best Practices at Summit on Hygienic Design Day Two

For food and beverage producers to avoid spreading illness and facing legal trouble, Marler offered a few suggestions:

• Have qualified, committed team members and a food safety culture. While this doesn’t guarantee protection against a disease outbreak, a dedicated team can work proactively to ensure food safety compliance.

• Involve vendors and suppliers. “You’re only as safe as all the components in your product, and how you involve vendors and suppliers is really critical,” said Marler.

• Establish relationships with regulators. “Most [regulators] don’t see themselves as food police, they see themselves in part as educators,” said Marler. Fostering a dialogue with regulators can help to stay informed and in compliance with food safety standards and potentially afford some leniency if things do go wrong, he explained.

McCormick & Company's Shahram Ajamian explained how a system mindset, considering quality and safety in every aspect of a process, can help to avoid food safety issues.McCormick & Company's six tips for quality by design

Trust can take a long time to build but can be lost much more easily.

That’s according to Shahram Ajamian, Senior Director of Global Quality and Food Safety Governance at McCormick & Company, who also spoke Wednesday at the Summit.

Ajamian explained that food producers earn trust through product consistency, transparency in operations (especially when things go wrong), and commitment to food safety. As he put it, “you can’t say you are too committed if you are always reactive to issues.”

When designing processes for a new food or beverage product, producers should focus on “quality by design,” Ajamian said, as it is difficult to compensate for bad design with inspection and other band-aids down the line. To achieve this, he suggested six points for food and beverage producers to consider:

1. Adopt a system mindset. Focus on every step of the process, not just the end product, to cover any impacts on product quality and safety. Ajamian explained McCormick uses a daily management system to enforce this system mindset, creating a feedback loop at the operator level all the way up to site leadership. This entails communication at multiple points per day to ensure concerns about food safety or product quality are raised.

2. Plan to achieve zero loss. “Every time that you need to do something twice, it’s a loss,” said Ajamian. He explained this will be a journey, and zero loss will be difficult to achieve in the start, but through a methodical approach, food and beverage producers can set zero loss as a standard.

3. Foster engagement at all levels for a food safety culture. “Show me the best engineering design, and I can tell you it can be destroyed very easily by people not following what they need to follow,” said Ajamian. Food and beverage producers should strive for stable, visible, and committed leadership. Employees should also be engaged with food safety standards and empowered to speak up if they encounter an issue.

4. Incorporate defense systems. Ajamian stressed the importance of internally identifying failures early in the process and using indicators to help in doing so. He suggested to track “leading indicators,” or signs of potential problems ahead, rather than lagging indicators that show real-time issues.

5. Design for hygiene from the start. “There is really no good solution for a bad design,” Ajamian noted, emphasizing that the long-term consequences of poor hygienic design often far exceed the upfront investment in getting it right. 

6. Invest in automation and digital transformation. As technology evolves and allows for processes to become more efficient, companies should place the latest innovations at the forefront to ensure food safety, Ajamian said. “You can still clean better than the way that you have been cleaning for 40 years. Is your cellphone the same way that it was two years ago?”

Grantek's Dylan De Anna (left), accompanied by George Kokkinias, Grantek Operations Manager (right), shared the benefits and current hurdles to overcome in integrating AI in CIP processes.How AI can enhance CIP systems

Clean-in-Place (CIP) systems are essential across nearly all food and beverage production lines, but they’re often overlooked if they aren’t explicitly broken. 

“A lot of times the companies are looking to put in brand new, shiny production lines, and the CIP systems are left in the dust,” said Dylan De Anna, Systems Engineer at Grantek, Wednesday at the Summit. “That’s fine if everything goes right, but it’s a huge impact to your business if something goes wrong.”

De Anna explored how AI, specifically predictive AI, can be used to optimize CIP systems. Food and beverage manufacturers can use this technology for critical point analysis, to “inform better operational decision-making, identify the perfect wash, clean the most effectively in the least amount of time,” he said.

Other use cases include “scheduling optimization of multiple lines being serviced by one system,” as well as predictive maintenance to determine when parts should be replaced, said De Anna. “AI can help with that, and get us ahead of the ball when we’re working with a system that’s so sensitive.”

But there are real hurdles. AI demands robust, reliable data and significant storage capacity. Shopfloor data often lives in the OT space, and OT networks are “often isolated just due to security reasons,” said De Anna. 

Connecting sensors through IoT can help: “Most transmitters, temp transmitters, pressure transmitters you’re working with, you send out an analog signal that comes back to your PLC. We’re starting to rethink that in our industry and understand that maybe we can connect all of our devices together to get a good picture of our system,” De Anna explained.

De Anna shared a real-world case with a food and beverage manufacturer in which a middleware, cloud-based solution delivered big results: “It centralized their data collection from multiple devices, increased visibility of CIP processes, and it had better alarming and notifications."