How to prevent hair contamination in bakery products?

Hi all,

We produce bakery products(cakes,bars,brownies and cookies).We have serious hair complaints.These hair are from arms of the bakers.
During processing bakers use their hands quite frequently to mix the ingredients after mechanical mixing to make sure homogeneous batter/dough is produced. Manual mixing is unavoidable in our processes due to variety of product we produce.For this reason bakers wear overall with short sleeves. They cant use seprate sleeves due to risk of foreign body contamination.
Please share your thoughts and experience how we can avoid arm-hair contamination?

Regards

Martinblue

Dear Martinblue,

I think it is ok to use short sleeved overall in a bakery but the baker should have an inner shirt and not only the overall.Also you may encourage personal hygiene including shaving of the armpits hairs which might signficantly reduce this hazard.Also, you may ask the overalls suppliers to supply overalls which are correctly fitting at the sleeves which will not allow hairs or sweat droplets(another hazard) to fall during production operations.Alternatively you can go for bakers jackets which have folded correctly fitting sleeves for your staff.

Regards,
Kamwenji Njuma

We had a similar incident some time back.After deciding that the cause was probably hair from the hands, we came up with quite a few solutions. We even thought of using arm length gloves at some point in time. However what was most effective was simple handwashing right upto the fore arms as this would dislodge falling hair.Hope this helps!