Car Insurance Matters

When it comes to food production facilities, bacteria contamination is a serious concern. In addition to keeping your equipment clean and sanitized, you need to address another major source of food contamination – your employees. If you want to reduce your risk of needing product recall insurance, here are some tips to help you focus on worker safety.

Outerwear Protection

Make sure that you supply enough protective outerwear to create a barrier between your production surfaces and the employee. This means offering full smocks, aprons, hairnets and gloves. Make sure that all of your protective clothing stays inside the facility at all times and is cleaned after every shift.

Protective gear and anti-microbial barriers are effective means of controlling some contamination, but only if you keep them sanitized. Establish a solid control process that will ensure that all of your protective gear is laundered and sanitized regularly. This may mean having a staff in place in the work areas exclusively for collecting protective gear to route it to the cleaning area.

Prohibit any jewelry on your production floor. Rings, piercings and other jewelry can actually become a safe haven for bacteria and particles. Eliminate the risk completely by keeping them off the floor.

Protective Foot Gear

You may not think of footwear as a concern, but the fact is that every step you take outside is a potential source of bacterial contamination. Establish a policy that requires the use of protective footwear on the production floor at all times. Disposable shoe covers are an affordable and efficient way to do this.

Foaming decontamination systems are ideal as well, because you can use them to disinfect your warehouse equipment, such as pallet jacks and forklifts. The more you can keep clean, the less risk you'll have of bacterial contamination elsewhere on the floor.

You may even find that it's best to require specific footwear on the property, and have your staff keep their footwear in a locker on the premises. That way, you can have the soles of the shoes cleaned thoroughly after each shift.

Hand Washing

Hand washing is one of the most important things that you can enforce for your staff when you work in a food production environment. Provide hand washing stations throughout the floor with anti-microbial soaps. Make sure the wash stations are conveniently positioned, because it encourages workers to use them regularly.

Establish a verification system to make sure that workers are cleaning their hands. Use random hand swabs as a means of ensuring that everyone is doing their part. When word gets out that you're conducting random hand-washing checks, that'll encourage everyone to do their part.

Food industry contamination and recalls can be costly, and they can threaten public health. With the tips presented here, you'll be able to ensure that your staff are taking as many precautions as possible. Be sure to contact professionals, such as those from Mariano Agency, for helpful guidance.