3 replies to this topic

[Alexis M]

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 

[Scampi]

This group is probably your best go to for help  https://www.ncausa.o...-Plan-Templates

National Coffee Roasters of america

 

You are going to have to remove each roaster from production until each one is properly cleaned------in all likely hood where possible, replacing hoses etc is going to be the faster and more economical option     then you put replacing parts on a preventative maintenance program at a frequency MORE often than you think---then based on inspections you should be able to reduce it to something reasonable

 

Re: cleaning-------particularly the roasters/grinders and silos  dry ice is probably your best bet---------hire an outside contractor for this

[acarver]

We are a family roaster/packager, in the business since the 1800s. I took this question to my husband who is the president and chief person in charge of maintenance. Like you, all our cleaning is dry cleaning, no cleansers, etc., and we have never had anything like this. He suggests that environment alone is probably not the cause and you should look deeper. Perhaps the quench process step is putting too much water on the coffee? The big thing is, once you get it cleaned, you don't want a repeat! :) 

[SHQuality]

If you are running continuous product, your best bet is to clean things out one by one, while running production on your remaining machines.

This will temporarily limit your capacity, but it is better than a full shutdown.

 

Of course, this assumes that the machines in question can produce coffee that meets the micro requirements of your customers.