Plant Hygiene – A Core Of Food Safety During Food Processing

Introduction A Food, if not safe, is not a Food Last few words are as simple as you read. If the food you are eating is not safe for consumption then it may be something else but not food for sure. And to produce safe food one have to inculcate Food Safety from Farm to Fork or from Grass to Glass i.e. every aspect of the entire value chain.

When you talk about Food safety during the processing, Plant Hygiene is the core of managing most of the food safety risks which are reported most of the time and we will try to understand the various aspects of Plant Hygiene.

Plant hygiene can be divided into:

Personal Hygiene

Equipment Hygiene

Infrastructural Hygiene

1 - Personal Hygiene: Personal Hygiene, the most critical from the external contamination (Physical, Biological and Chemical) point view, is nothing but ensuring that there is no any contamination getting introduced in the product or equipment by the personals who are working inside the processing plant.

Personal hygiene can be dived into:

A) Hand / Footwear Washing and Sanitizing- Most of the time contamination vectors are your hand and shoes because you touch various surfaces (including yourself) with your hand and shoes and if you are not cleaning these before entering to the plant then you are inviting various bugs to you processing environment. So as a very basic practices one need to clean and sanitize the hands and put a shoe cover ( minimum ) before entering to the manufacturing facility ( Changing shoe is better option than using Shoe cover )

B) Personal Protective Equipment – These PPEs are not for you but for the manufacturing environment minimizing the contamination which may spread by you. PPEs are:

Hair Cover ( to minimize the hair fall into the product )

Apron/ Plant Dress ( To minimize the dust/ dirt/microbes coming from outside through you dress)

Face Mask ( to stop the microbial contamination )

Beard Mask ( For those who have beard )