n to prevent any further contamination due to a contaminated fork of a forklift or due to employees carrying allergen in their feet? Is there any way we can validate cleaning?
Thanks .
Wow, allergen specific spill clean procedure. I'd no idea such a thing existed. I am only used to chemical spill procedures and wet/leaking spills, or spills over/into product
But okay, let's say you have gluten all over your floor, you sweep it/maybe floor scrubber (but NEVER air) and tiny bits of gluten get on the bottom of an employee's shoes.
Do you have a food contact surface that is regularly exposed to your employee's shoes or forklift tires? Does your product have enough contact with forklift tires and employee shoes to contaminate to the 20 ppm limit (or whatever your spec is)? Sure, maybe you have a mezzanine with a giant tank they climb into, but at that point the amount of gluten contamination would be undetectable.
I may be wrong (it's happened before), but having to break down protein from something that is waste on the floor sounds crazy. I guess if you reused grain that fell on the floor you'd want to make sure there was no gluten on the floor. It doesn't reproduce and grow and take up house in crevices like a pathogen would.
Make sure you have a part about taking the tools to the sanitation room and cleaning them I guess. You're already segregating the area, so there shouldn't be foot traffic getting contaminated. Maybe you could write a painfully specific and controlling SOP about employee decontamination, and force employees on the Allergen Spill Response Team to carry extra shoes to switch out once they are cleared of the danger zone.
If your food contact surfaces are shared, what you have deemed appropriate as clean out chemicals (maybe alcohol, quat? Purge?) would probably be as effective on other surfaces, say, the floor. If a broom and brush procedure has been validated as sufficiently cleaning out your equipment, why isn't that procedure sufficient for the floor?
Edited by magenta_majors, 21 May 2014 - 11:57 PM.