Good morning all, I wanted to pick some of your brains and see if yall could help me brainstorm some ideas for how to clean our equipment... We are a dry plant and strictly deal with dry ingredients, with this being said we have no cleaners/sanitizers in house. Honestly we haven't physically cleaned any of our lines, systems, hoppers I don't believe ever, atleast since ive worked here (over a year). The way our plant and machines have been set up is for continuous production 24/7 so our cleaning procedures are all flushes where we dump 75-100lbs of coffee before running. The problem is we do not run like this, coffee is ran Tuesday- Friday on the Morning shift and is dumped, roasted, and normally grinded on Mondays. Where the problem comes in at is we are in a very wet and humid environment... our plant and equipment "sweats" constantly and we have been finding mold and buildup that has been broken off from inside one of our hoppers and transport tubes above the line. As of right now this line has been somewhat disassembled (sawed the top of the hopper off, we have no access points in our equipment) and we have been able to see the full extent of the build up and chunks that we have been finding during our flushes. Its bad. I just sent out Swabs of this machine to our micro lab to see what all is inside. We just had a team come out yesterday and sand blast (but with coffee) the machine and it looks eh, better.. still doesn't meet my standard of clean but its a start.. no mold.. (still some chunky buildup) I feel like we are going down the rabbit hole with this one considering if this single machine and hopper was this bad then there's no telling how bad everything else is on the other lines (8 total lines) We cannot afford to stop production to clean everything including silos, grinders, roasters, transport tubes etc. To take everything apart we would be looking at MONTHS if not a year of being shutdown. Just shutting down this machine for this past week has been a nightmare on our operators, mechanics, and myself. I'm at a lost and honestly its so overwhelming there's just so many machines and pieces of equipment I have no idea of even where to start. If anyone has any information that might be helpful please feel free to share.. Im open to any and all suggestions at this point..
Thanks in Advance,
Alexis