Sanitary design and maintenance programs in the food industry
Technical note of edition 9 on sanitary design and maintenance programs in the food industry, with a focus on diagnosis, prevention and criteria applicable to professional pest management.
The struggle for existence, as Charles Darwin said in his book “THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES” includes not only the life of the individual, but also the reproductive capacity established as the success of leaving offspring to perpetuate the species. As far as pests are concerned, this success necessarily depends on the interaction with biotic and abiotic factors that determine the course of their life. The resources necessary for subsistence are primarily linked to food as a fundamental means for generating energy that allows continuity. The search for that resource puts us in
conflict with pests because they invade our territory to try to take advantage of ours, however, limiting pests' access to sources of nutrition is essential for their control. In this context, with a preventive perspective, many of the food safety and security standards require the implementation of programs aimed at obtaining adequate environments, from a health perspective, for the preparation and storage of food. These environments must try to limit the entry of pests through the management of access routes, caused by failures in the infrastructure and limit
the offer of food, water and shelter as a consequence of the intensification of sanitation and hygiene actions. Although the objective of sanitary design is to reduce or eliminate the risk that there may be a source of physical, chemical or microbiological contamination for food, both directly and indirectly it also pursues two other purposes: facilitating cleaning and disinfection, as well as contributing to the conservation and maintenance of the equipment or facility itself. The type of surfaces in contact with food and their geometry must be considered, that is
It is necessary to prioritize easy accessibility and disassembly, drainage, tightness, roughness, as well as materials according to the process (type of stainless steel, aluminum, polymeric materials, etc.). From the perspective of Integrated Urban Pest Management, sanitary design must fundamentally consider airtightness to prevent the entry of pests into the facilities to be protected, ease of cleaning surfaces and equipment, as well as accessibility, that is, facilitate obtaining the desired degree of cleanliness with minimal effort, directing these efforts to limit
access to food, water and shelter. Sanitary maintenance is aimed at maintaining the initial conditions over time, under the same scheme and standards, including the management of by-products and process waste. Regarding exclusion efforts with a tightness approach, the use of air curtains with a flow rate greater than 8 m/s measured 1 m from the ground and an outward inclination between 12° and 20° significantly reduces the presence of flying insects in sensitive environments. The use of rubber weather stripping with a metal structure in the lower part of doors, window weather stripping, screens with adequate mesh, self-closing doors, PVC or Hawaiian curtains well installed in terms of coverage and overlap, sealing pastes with polystyrene beads, contact cements and in some cases with high external pest pressure the use of entrance anterooms, contribute to avoiding unwanted intrusions. Cleaning is a major factor in the sanitary maintenance approach since it eliminates offers of food, water and shelter. Establishing a sanitation program with appropriate frequencies, technology adjusted to specific needs and specific products for each circumstance is essential. The use of high-power industrial vacuum cleaners allows large quantities of dust, granules or process by-products to be collected in areas
where the use of water is inconvenient. Dry saturated steam is a highly relevant alternative since it allows removing dirt, disinfecting and disinfesting through the thermal shock produced by water at more than 180° C temperature and more than 10 bars of pressure, without the risk of chemical contamination. In other cases, the use of detergents, alkaline, neutral or acidic, according to need, contribute to the dissolution and removal of dirt without damaging the surfaces or objects where they are applied. Everything described must be implemented based on the systematic and periodic development of thorough inspections that allow, in addition to identifying the presence of pests, their distribution and abundance, to have a preventive view of infestations from a
critical, analytical and interpretive exercise of the conditions that may favor their presence, so that what is necessary can be managed to limit the entry, attraction, development and dissemination of pests. Achieving the expected results in terms of pest population abundance without the implementation of a sanitary design and maintenance program is unrealistic. Articulating and structuring an integrated urban pest management program solely based on the use of pesticides is not only a conceptual error, but, in the food industry, it increases the risk of chemical contamination and poisoning due to exposure to pesticides without guaranteeing the safety of the foods prepared, processed and stored.