Hello,
I am going to apologize in advance for the long explanation before I ask my question, I want to provide as much information and context as possible.
I work in third party food storage, and we have a few locations with freezer, cooler and ambient/dry storage spaces. Senior management has asked that I review the frequency of the floor cleaning, as we use a third party company which is quite costly, and the quote to clean our one freezer (roughly 36,000 sq ft fully racked) came in around $5000 CND ($3954.75 USD) and the system they use we do not need to turn off the freezers. the cooler dry locations are roughly $700-$1000 CND per month ($550-$790 USD)
Many of our sites have licenses under the Safe Food for Canadians Regulation (SFCR) or hold an Establishment number through CFIA, and we have a HACCP Plan (or now know as a Preventative Control Plan) that still follows the FSEP Program and we are trying to get SQF as several of our customers are now requesting this.
As per SQF cleaning must be done at a pre-determined frequency, so I have determined these frequencies:
- Freezers-> Low Risk-> Yearly or As Needed (spills etc..)
- Coolers-> Medium Risk (due to RTE Meat/Nut Based Milk storage)-> Monthly or spot cleaning as needed
- Dry/Ambient Floors -> Med/High Risk (due to product damage-powders) - Monthly or spot cleaning as needed
- Dock Areas- Low Risk-> Semi-Annually or spot cleaning as needed
Our ambient/dry warehouse store a lot of powders and we have a lot of leaks and damages, and as we all know dry/ambient (not temperature or humidity controlled) run the risk of rodents, which I battle often.
Senior Management has requested if I can change these frequency to be more "fiscally responsible".
My question to you all, how can I extend the cleaning frequency and PROVE that the new frequencies are not posing a risk of contamination to food? And how would I conduct a validation study to back this up?
Thank you for reading, I really appreciated any and all feedback.