Getting a kombucha brewery SQF certified

Hello everyone, I am a Plant Manager at a Kombucha brewery, we are expanding our operations and moving our processing facility to a new location. Along with that we will be working on getting our facility SQF certified.

I have a couple of questions:-

1. For our packaging line we pack Kombucha in glass bottles. Do we need a enclosed room with a suspended roof in the area where the bottles are filled ( before putting a cap on) or we can have the packing line in the open warehouse space with a procedure in place to clean the overhead I beams in roof to validate our sanitization process.
2. For draining waste water and alcohols from the brewing process, we are planning to have trench drains connected to underground CPVC pipes leading to drain .

So my question is - Can a trench drain be made of concrete with epoxy coating on it with a metal grate to cover the drain, is an acceptable form of trench drain system under SQF system?  Thanks in advance. 

Hello everyone, I am a Plant Manager at a Kombucha brewery, we are expanding our operations and moving our processing facility to a new location. Along with that we will be working on getting our facility SQF certified.

I have a couple of questions:-

1. For our packaging line we pack Kombucha in glass bottles. Do we need a enclosed room with a suspended roof in the area where the bottles are filled ( before putting a cap on) or we can have the packing line in the open warehouse space with a procedure in place to clean the overhead I beams in roof to validate our sanitization process.
2. For draining waste water and alcohols from the brewing process, we are planning to have trench drains connected to underground CPVC pipes leading to drain .

So my question is - Can a trench drain be made of concrete with epoxy coating on it with a metal grate to cover the drain, is an acceptable form of trench drain system under SQF system?  Thanks in advance. 

Hi Terry,

I have no idea what Kombucha is but the basic answer to Qu.1 is the standard FS 101 requirement - Risk Assessment.

I anticipate that the consequence of the (above) latter in current case is typically answered in Post 2.

i wouldn't put kombucha in a warehouse unless I was filling using a completely automated aseptic filling machine..........too much dust, too many variables, never mind mold spores likely to spoil your batch

Hey there, former QA Manager at an SQF-Certified kombucha brewery here. 

I'll echo what others have said so far: you'll almost certainly want to do your filling in a room with a drop ceiling. Too much potential for contamination with spoilage organisms, foreign material, etc. This may have been an issue with our bottle supplier or our specific filler, but we dealt with burst bottles in the filler on a semi-regular basis, which would send kombucha and broken glass flying up to 10 feet away - it's a lot easier to spot and remove splatter/glass shards from a white ceiling panel than a wooden beam.

Your idea for drainage sounds perfectly fine.

Feel free to reach out if any other questions pop up!