Standard on how long equipment can remain idle in a soiled condition?
I was hoping someone could provide any standard on how long equipment can remain idle in a soiled condition? The facility is a low-moisture fruits and vegetables drying facility. There's been an ask to resume production on Monday on the equipment that was used the previous week without any sort of cleaning, not even a dry clean.
I would really advise against that. Unless you've done some kind of extensive cleaning validation for your particular facility you should be cleaning between runs of product. Take the time to clean, there's much more at risk here compared to the minor benefit of saving some time.
Allowing product to sit on your equipment all weekend is just asking for the material to become impossibly difficult to remove. You really should be ending the day by cleaning all your equipment, otherwise you're just making life harder for your teams.
Sometimes finding an explicit "number of hours equipment can be dirty" to reference for these kinds of questions is difficult. 21 CFR 110.35(d) states:
"Sanitation of food-contact surfaces. All food-contact surfaces, including utensils and food-contact surfaces of equipment, shall be cleaned as frequently as necessary to protect against contamination of food."
Could your teams prove that despite leaving your equipment soiled for 3+ days, they're being cleaned often enough to prevent contamination of your product? You would need to have a pretty good understanding of what kinds of bacteria/biofilms may develop in that time.
The answer really is, it cannot and should be cleaned and sanitized immediately following production daily
You're dealing with things like ecoli, salmonella, possibly hepatitis A/B and listeria species by the very nature of your product Allowing that equipment to sit or any length of time is negligent at best and fool hardy
By not cleaning post production, your giving all the bacteria the perfect environment to thrive in, rapidly multiplying and leading to potential bio film which requires heavy manual labour to remove
The fact that you've been asked to do this correlates beautifully with the sheer number of recalls coming out of the united states that keeps going up
If this is something you'd like to validate I can guarantee it will be lengthy and really not worth it unless the cleaning is high-risk AND extremely labor intensive. In pharmaceuticals, they normally validate their cleaning processes to be able to do this and have different tiered cleanings based on how long a vessel or tank has been 'out of service'.
Either way, give us a call at xxxx for an ISO 17025 accredited 3rd party lab's guidance :)
I was hoping someone could provide any standard on how long equipment can remain ... in a soiled condition? ...
Idle or active is probably irrelevant. What is the longest interval your sanitation cycle is validated for during active use?
You are not going to find how long equipment can be idle while soiled. the fact that it is soiled means it needs to be cleaned. No way around it.