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[Shrimper]

Hope everyone is well!

 

I have joined this seafood processing company in their ~45th year of processing. I have been here about 9 months and feel like I am well away from introductory training (for reference I have had no food processing training prior). However, I keep finding these holes in our programs that I ask management "haven't we being doing this for the past 5+ years?" to which I often get a yes, but... response.

 

This one is in regards to our vacuum packing machine. We have no protocol on how to clean it, who cleans it, but there is a reference to it being cleaned daily in our master sanitation program. I have taken the liberty to bring this up to management and now I need help on how to clean these types of machines. I understand they are pricey, delicate, and I do not want to be the reason something breaks. Any advice on both of the topics described would be greatly appreciated! 

 

Cheers,

Shrimper

[jfrey123]

I don't know that the "yes, but..." scenarios ever go away.  I'm hearing about one just today from my VP of FS and it just boggles the mind how production thinks they can pass the buck when they knowingly go off procedure and then blame us for not catching it.

 

As for the cleaning protocol, when I'm in that spot I always try to get sanitation instructions from the manufacturer(s).  But even then, lots of times the "village knowledge" of how to do something won't match and often the guys actually having to do it have found easier ways to accomplish the goal.  In those cases, I like to join and see how they're doing the cleaning and then write the SOP to match what they're actually doing.  It's a good opportunity to snap some photos, talk to them about the actual steps they're taking, and create an SOP that they'll actually follow in practice.  Combining the in-house developed instruction with key points from the manufacturer's instructions about any critical steps, like "Don't remove X before Y to avoid breaking X" has always given me pretty robust SOP's.  Referring to any maintenance instruction as well can be helpful for catching little details as well.