Freezer/Cooler/Warehouse Floor Cleaning Frequency-Cold Storage
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.
Hello,
I worked in a DC that had a fresh chicken cooler at around 28-32ºF and the smell of the 11-15 day chicken was way different from 3-10 days for obvious reason. I ran into the situation were this area had to be cleaned every other day. Of course, we did not pay a cleaning service because we had a Tennant scrubber (which I recommend) that saved us from hiring an outside service. We saw a spike in chemical purchases, however, we were never called out for the chicken cooler in any audit.
By the way an investment on a Tennant Scrubber will pay for itself in less than two years, depending on the model there are some that don't require chemicals and that makes it more attractive.
Happy Auditing!!
Hi Rey Sierra,
We do own a Tenant T5 floor scrubber, we just do not have any sanitation staff, and it was too much pressure on the warehouse staff to complete monthly floor cleaning and with multiple locations we were moving the machine locations and it was getting damaged, I eventually built a specialized pallet for transport to prevent it from rolling around in a truck. The machine was still getting damaged and due to no sanitation staff, the cleaning was not happening.
The Tenant T5 cannot do the freezers as the lines and pads freeze, the company we use uses a waterless system that prevents ice formation on the floor.
All our products are in primary to thrice packaging, so the odor is minimal, unless there is a spill or damage