Health and safety matters in any factory. Every business has a responsibility to both staff and customers, after all. In most industries, though, we consider this once we’ve got a factory in place. It’s not as though it’s an afterthought; we just have to wait until we have established factories before safety procedures are possible. In food manufacturing, though, thing are a little different.

That’s because health and safety are even more essential here. They’re so vital that you need to design them into your factory. This is the best way to close those margins for error. If you go ahead with the design before considering this, you may even need to refit or entirely remodel areas of your factory. That’d cost time and money you don’t have. Don’t let it happen, then. Instead, keep reading to find out how you can take care of health and safety from day one.

Make Sure You Can Keep Clean

Never does cleanliness matter more than where food is concerned. While general cleaning processes are enough to get by in most factories, that isn’t the case for you. You need to disinfect regularly and clean dropped food before it becomes a contaminant. The trouble is that, if you don’t consider this during design, you could make your life a lot harder. That’s because small gaps down the backs of machines and the like will be a nightmare to always keep clean. Make your life easier by keeping your factory design open and spacious. Keep machines clear from walls. That way, you aren’t inviting bacteria to grow in any hard-to-reach places. As a general rule, you need to ensure that staff can reach every last corner of this space.

Consider Your Pipes

The majority of food factories rely on pipe systems to transfer food. This is an efficient method which saves contamination in all manner of ways. But, it does mean that you need to consider your pipes during the design process. For one, you need to ensure that they’re laid in a way which means food will clear. You also need to ensure the use of things like pipe alignment clamps for keeping your pipes are as well-aligned and secure as possible. These save issues such a leaks, as well as ensuring there are no mismatched areas of piping where bacteria could form.

Keep Zones Separate

You also need to make sure that each of your manufacturing zones are separated. By considering this during design, you stand the best chance at clear boundaries between zones. That ensures that you avoid cross contamination as much as possible. That’s sure to serve you far better than a zone system which you put in place once your factory is already standing.

Take care of these, and you should have a safe food factory without needing to scramble for solutions. You might still need to tweak things along the way, but at least you could rest easy that you had a foundation which promoted safe food handling.