The Importance of Hygiene for Frozen Food Manufacturing Companies
Fluctuating demand and supply chain issues are just two of the frozen food industry’s toughest challenges. Fluctuating demand can cause unnecessary waste and lost value. Supply chain issues can slow productivity, also resulting in lost revenue. However, there’s a third challenge that all frozen food manufacturing companies must monitor– food hygiene and safety.
Maintaining good frozen food safety and hygiene is critical in making high-quality products for your customers. Ensuring employees practice good hygiene and employ equipment to minimize health hazards demonstrates how frozen food manufacturing companies are committed to employee and consumer health. But what are specific examples of how frozen food labels can improve their hygiene and safety?
Quantum is the industry leader in automated food equipment, and our experts are here to help your brand level up its frozen food safety. By comparing IQF food processing and food processing cleaning equipment to automation, we’ll review how frozen food manufacturing companies can implement better safety protocols with state-of-the-art automated technology. When brands improve the safety of their assembly lines, they improve the quality of their products as well.
Frozen Food Safety and Hygiene
Frozen food safety revolves around employee hygiene and the state of the food equipment used. To ensure that no foodborne illness or foreign objects contaminate food, it’s important to implement strong frozen food safety protocols. Here are some steps to take when improving food safety and assembly line hygiene:
Require Employee Hygiene
Frozen food safety starts with employees. For frozen food manufacturing companies, proper employee hygiene is critical for creating safe meals. Employees must wash their hands before handling food products, which lowers the chance of passing a foodborne illness to the food. Employees should also use hair nets, gloves, and similar personal protective equipment when appropriate.
Regularly Clean Food Processing Equipment
Another source of contamination is often dirty food processing equipment. Cleaning this equipment when necessary removes food particles that help bacteria to grow. The steps to clean food equipment differ between types of equipment, so it’s necessary to know when steps to take to sufficiently clean it. Bacteria can grow quickly and contaminate meals during assembly, which can risk consumer health. Regularly cleaning the production equipment greatly decreases this risk.
Employ Technology to Simplify Maintenance
Cleaning food equipment can cause significant downtime and could be so involved that it discourages employees from sufficiently cleaning the equipment. The key to efficient cleaning and maintenance is employing technology that makes it easier. Why make cleaning more difficult than it has to be, especially with the latest technology available? Most Quantum automated equipment is washdown-compatible and easy to maintain, which minimizes downtime and cleaning simple. When all kinds of ingredients, from lettuce to meats, can cause cross-contamination risks to your assembly line, brands can streamline maintenance with automated food equipment.
Good employee hygiene, regular cleaning, and automation are key to maintaining a safe assembly line. Frozen food manufacturing companies need to follow safety standards to comply with governmental standards, and these steps can be part of your hygiene plan. While these regulations may be intricate, a solution to simplify assembly line safety is to automate your lines as much as possible. Now, let’s explore why and how that is.
IQF Food Processing and Automation
IQF food processing is an easy way to offer high-quality and convenient meals to consumers. The inclusion of IQF ingredients provides customers with nutritional value, regardless of freezing. Nevertheless, health hazards are still prevalent in IQF food processing and can pose a risk to consumers. At Quantum, we offer automated food equipment that can minimize hazards like poor employee hygiene, unsanitary equipment, and low ingredient turnover. Quantum automated equipment allows brands to lower employee handling of food, simplify cleaning, and keep ingredients fresh.
Minimizing Employee Contact
Good employee hygiene is important to any food assembly line. However, minimizing employee contact with the food can also lower the chance of passing foodborne illnesses onto the meals. Quantum automated food equipment requires very little staffing besides maintenance and restocking ingredients, allowing your company to improve productivity while also centralizing efforts.
Simplifying Cleaning
As we’ve mentioned before, equipment that’s hard to clean offers no incentive to the team to do so. Many equipment types from Quantum are stainless steel and washdown-compatible, which simplifies cleaning for staff. Simple maintenance is vital for effective cleaning.
Increasing Ingredient Turnover
Because Quantum equipment can assemble hundreds of completed meals per hour, the equipment sees high ingredient turnover. High ingredient turnover is important in food assembly hygiene because it keeps the ingredients from sitting in the machines and going bad. Because Quantum equipment improves productivity, it helps brands keep their meals fresh for their customers.
These guidelines for food safety are great starting points for frozen food manufacturing companies to improve line hygiene. Even compared to cleaning equipment, automation is a powerful solution to maintain a hygienic assembly line. Let’s now focus on how automation may be the better choice compared to needing tons of food processing cleaning equipment.
Food Processing Cleaning Equipment vs. Quantum Automation
Food processing cleaning equipment is necessary when your food manufacturing equipment isn’t easy to clean. Needing the additional equipment to maintain your food equipment can add to downtime and frustration. However, because Quantum automation requires few tools and is washdown-compatible, employing our machinery can drastically change the amount of time dedicated to cleaning. Cleaning equipment often requires extra investments, both in capital and time for training, whereas Quantum equipment is highly user-friendly and built to simplify cleaning and maintenance.
Improve Food Manufacturing Hygiene With Quantum
We’ve designed Quantum automated food equipment to simplify hygiene and safety for frozen food manufacturing companies. In a world with constant, foodborne hazards to employee and consumer health, streamlining hygiene and safety is critical to prevent injuries and illnesses. Food safety is a critical part of good manufacturing processes, and Quantum Technical Services has made equipment maintenance easy. Contact our team today to learn how your brand can improve its hygiene protocols with Quantum’s automated equipment.