Floor Foamers or Dry Powder - Wet Environment

Hi All, 

For the past however many years since floor foamers started being used, our company has been using them. We also use a quat footbath for employees upon entrance. This is the only type of floor/foot bath we have seen in a wet environment. 

Of course, one of our customers is insisting we use a dry powder instead. Let me remind you, we are a WET batch processing facility. Meaning we only make one batch in a tank at a time and manually fill it into pails. Our floors have a grit to them so they are not slippery. We also have not seen presumptive or positive testing in the production rooms that would lead us to believe these are ineffective.

Our customer is pushing us so hard to move to a dry powder and I would like any research or thoughts that we could go back to him with. We have tried the dry powder and with the forklift/pallet jack/foot traffic patterns it just gets EVERYWHERE. 

Also, how do you determine what is "enough" when putting it in front of the overhead doors ? 

Has any WET environment tried the powder? What did you try and how did you control it? 

Any suggestions/thoughts/advice would be great...

Thanks All!!!! 

We had a client that did freeze drying of beef cubes and chicken pieces to make dog food. The environment was wet.

On day one of what would become a 5-month turn-around project and then SQF certification I was walking thru the facility and saw they were using dry sanitizer powder... well, I didn't see it as that at first, I asked what the heck all the white powder build-up was at the dock, into the trucks, back into the building and all over the production flooring - white sanitizer powder.

What an incredible mess!

And what a mess to clean up everyday.

The owners thought that was that as long as he could "see" the powder coating the bottoms of peoples shoes and forklift trucks the more satisfied he was that it was "sanitized."

Once he saw a cost comparason and testing results of effectiveness he changed his mind on the spot.

They use foamers now.

Do you monitor your foamers/footbath regularly during production? If your process is wet and you already show effective usage of floor foamers (good EMP numbers, adequate monitoring of foam consistency, coverage, and sanitizer level), then I am not quite sure why your customer would want you to change this.  "If it ain't broke, don't fix it..." Your own historical records of monitoring should be enough to present to the customer. 

Did the customer give specifics over why they want to see a dry powder? I've used dry powders in the past, but for dry processes. It works very well, but yes it does track nearly everywhere. That's kind of the point, but it does create a bit of an eyesore. 

Can your customer justify why they want you to use dry powder, or are they just saying "you should use dry powder"?

The decision to use floor foamers or dry powder should be based on facts and not opinions.

If you would be tracking the dry powder through your plant, this could be considered to be a source of foreign material contamination.  This might require a more stringent control program but not offer better sanitation than a floor foamer.

wet foamer............or a boot tray.  Also, the dry quat will not be effective once diluted in the wet environment. Just ask the customer why and then present your case why not and have the foamer or tray(s) installed  done and done