Using part of a new warehouse for food production
We are an SQF certified cite making bakery products. We have acquired a new warehouse in the same building in order to expand our facilities. We have broken through 2 walls and are currently only using the space as warehousing because the floors, walls, ceiling and lights are not up to SQF code for processing. The owner of the company wants to use PART of the new warehouse for processing. Is this even possible without putting up walls? Can we partially finish the room for processing? If half of it is still storage, can that half stay unfinished?
You can partially finish the space but I guess its depends on the type of process to you plan to put into that space.
Depending on what the area looks like, the air controls, the exposure to finished product, environmental pathogen risks you'll have to create some preventive controls to maintain the process area.
I ran QA for a SQF certified site in a building like you described: strip of warehouse spaces where we leased 4 in a row, pass throughs cut between them. Only one suite was the production area, and closing in the exposed beams for the full space was considered cost prohibitive. Areas directly above our production lines were sheetrocked and painted, our policies and programs prohibited any open product in the production room unless it was inside the designated zones under those proper ceilings. I defended this building and these practices through our first SQF audit, 3 subsequent SQF audits, and that facility still has the same plan to this day.
I'll say that employee training and understanding was key to this being successful. I had auditors try to ask employees to open product boxes in the middle of the production room and in storage areas (places with exposed beam ceilings) to test us, and fortunately they all told the auditor they had to take the product to an acceptable place for sampling. Training, and of course designing the environmental monitoring and sanitation and other programs to acknowledge the fact the space was not an auditor's dream scenario.