Is Inefficient Cleaning Decreasing Your Throughput?

Cleaning your line is a given in every food and beverage industry—and not just for regulatory compliance. For your customers’ safety and their trust in your brand, proper cleaning is a promise. 

In terms of mitigating risk—of microbial issues, allergens, product recalls, etc.—sanitation becomes a practical necessity. Every food facility has to have excellent, regimented cleaning procedures, or their brand is distrusted right out of the market. One bad contamination event is all it takes.

Often overlooked, though, is that cleaning is foundational to your production. When your facility’s food safety falls short, it causes operational disruptions that can throttle your throughput—and might already be doing so. Many facilities simply accept cleaning’s difficulty and downtime as necessary hurdles.

They should be looking at them as opportunities.

Here’s how to simplify your cleaning for maximum production.

Sanitation Is a Tool, Not a Chore

It’s this simple—finding and eliminating overlooked uptime loss will immediately boost your production. 

This means, in addition to being effective, your cleaning must be as efficient as possible. Otherwise, you’re leaving throughput on the table. 

If you haven’t taken the time to investigate and optimize your food lines’ sanitation, now’s the time to treat it as the integral part of your bottom line it truly is. Let it be the opportunity it is.

Every food manufacturing facility functionally has to maintain the same high sanitation standards. If you can maintain those standards more efficiently with less downtime—that becomes a competitive advantage.

At the very least, it eliminates hidden time sinks and lets your throughput reach its full potential.

Our experts recommend first making it easier to access, inspect, and clean your conveyor belts, components, and equipment. A simple way to do this is to use systems—rather than piecing together individual solutions—to meet your production needs with less complexity.

The Intralox FoodSafe System, for example, includes everything you need to keep your line up and running as hygienically as possible. Its belting, tools, components, services, and trainings are all designed to work together to foolproof your operations—including cleaning—while reducing required labor, time, and cost.

In other words, a truly holistic, system-level approach like the FoodSafe System eliminates production bottlenecks by simplifying your sanitation. 

Here’s how it works.

Design with Cleaning in Mind

Hygienic design is the idea that systems should be engineered to facilitate safer, simpler, and faster sanitation. In other words, truly efficient cleaning demands that you select belting, equipment, and components that were designed to be cleaned.

Tensioned flat belting provides us a simple, ubiquitous example of the opposite. 

These widely-used belts carry risk of mistracking due to their reliance on tension. Without releasing that tension, they’re difficult to clean and impossible to lift for component and frame access. 

Plus, their fabric can retain moisture and—especially with constant re-tensioning—fray, risking both bacterial and foreign material contamination. When belts do fray and break, repairs and splicing require expertise and downtime.

Hinge-free, modular, and tensionless conveyors like our ThermoDrive belts can help by minimizing common bacteria harborage points and maximize accessibility for sanitation and inspection. Its hygienic design enables faster, more thorough cleaning in place—with big results.

When Shanthi Poultry integrated ThermoDrive belting into their operation, they experienced 33% shorter cleaning times and 50% less water usage. Since retrofitting to ThermoDrive belting, Italian manufacturer Deco Industrie’s simplified cleaning has significantly reduced maintenance time and costs. They’ve also completely eliminated belt-related production downtime, reporting no unscheduled downtime in over 8 years of operation.

Some indicators of poor hygienic design include water pooling, poor drain access, niches, poor welds, hard-to-access areas, and any materials that are not chemically compatible with your product or cleaning methods.

Commercial Food Sanitation (CFS), an Intralox company, offers robust education programs built to teach hygienic design. They also teach that one of the most crucial aspects of your cleaning is its consistency and its repeatability.

And for that, you need a little more than hygienic design.

Enhance Hygienic Design’s Impact with Automation

Automating certain cleaning processes can not only improve your sanitation’s efficiency, it can also improve its effectiveness and your staff’s safety.

Incorporating clean-in-place (CIP) solutions like spray bars allows you to automate the most labor-intensive sanitation steps of cleaning. Part of our OneTrack suite of tools and components, Intralox’s CIP spray bar ensures consistent, replicable results while also saving time, water, and effort. 

Automation becomes particularly effective as part of a holistically, hygienically designed system. For example, our CleanLock sprockets stay in position during manual or automated cleaning—without the use of any separate retainment features. 

Integrating CleanLock sprockets alongside a CIP spray bar, then, means the sprockets don’t need to be reset after sanitation. It also reduces catchpoints and eliminates extra pieces to maintain. 

If you can put a system in place that ensures every cleaning cycle achieves the same high standard—with no chance of human error—your risk of microbial contamination plummets.