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selminay

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Posted 06 August 2007 - 09:27 AM

Hi all,
I would ask your opinions about usages of pallet types in food industry. It is clear that wooden should be forbidden in manufacturing area. But what about packaging areas?

If you consider that raw materials comes on wooden pallets, and finished products are delivered with wooden pallets, and additionally you need space and manpower to change the wooden pallets with plastic ones, it is hard to find solution.

Waiting for your suggestions, possibly example applications in food companies.

Thanks / Regards,
Selmin



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Posted 06 August 2007 - 02:50 PM

:off_topic: , I rememembered my previous firm where we had one of the products as 'pellets', another as 'pastilles' and both after packing used to be stacked on 'pallets'. New comers always used to spoonerise them like the old nutty professor who often would ask his student 'are you boiling the icycle' or to another he would say 'you have been tasying two whole worms'... :lol2:

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A Sankara Narayanan

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Posted 06 August 2007 - 04:46 PM

Hi Selmin.

The meausures you take to control wooden pallets depends on the nature of the company and the products involved and of course the results of a Hazard Analysis.

Many companies have a 'depal' area where materials are emptied off wooden pallets and placed in suitable containers (after sieving/screening in many cases) and the containers are placed on plastic pallets and moved to the production area.

In the case of packaging areas it is unavoidable to have wooden pallets present if that is what the products are despatched on. If the product is packaged before it comes anywhere near the wooden pallet and there is a system for inspecting pallets and removing damaged ones then you should be ok, this kind of set up is used in food packaging plants the world over.


Why put off until tomorrow that which you can avoid doing altogether ?

selminay

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Posted 07 August 2007 - 06:15 AM

Hi Selmin.

The meausures you take to control wooden pallets depends on the nature of the company and the products involved and of course the results of a Hazard Analysis.

Many companies have a 'depal' area where materials are emptied off wooden pallets and placed in suitable containers (after sieving/screening in many cases) and the containers are placed on plastic pallets and moved to the production area.

In the case of packaging areas it is unavoidable to have wooden pallets present if that is what the products are despatched on. If the product is packaged before it comes anywhere near the wooden pallet and there is a system for inspecting pallets and removing damaged ones then you should be ok, this kind of set up is used in food packaging plants the world over.


Dear MartLgn,
Thanks for your reply.
We don't have a system for inspecting pallets and removing damaged ones, I can say only visual control we have. As wooden pallets are source of physical contamination risk and microbiological contamination risk (proper for insects) we are trying to find solution.

I found following address "name is pallet exchanger". This equipment helps to change wooden pallets with plastic ones. As far as I know some pharmaceutical companies use it. I wonder whether food companies use. Because it is not a cheap equipment if you consider food sector doesn't have strict rules as pharmaceuticals.

http://www.mueller-g...products_view=0

Regards,
Selmin


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Posted 07 August 2007 - 07:26 PM

Pretty much what others have said. You either suffer the pain of decanting from wooden pallets to plastic pallets before transferring products into high care area. Or you suffer the pain of maintaining pallets in good condition, free from all forms of contamination. You takes your choice. :smarty:


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MartLgn

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Posted 08 August 2007 - 07:10 AM

Just to add a few points based on my experience of plastic pallets. If you are going to use them you have to choose the style very carefully and there is no 'magic bullet' as the companies leasing or selling them would have you believe...

1) They have to be washed and many of them have nooks and crannies that hold water.
2) They shed pieces of plastic due to wear and tear.
3) Some of them are VERY heavy.
4) The flat top styles can be challenging to handle, ask a fork lift driver!
5) They have to complete an enormous number of cycles to be economically justifiable, once a few start to dissapear the accontants get very edgy.

They do have their good points such as being easier to clean and no wood splinters but they are not the answer for everybody - Caveat Emptor


Why put off until tomorrow that which you can avoid doing altogether ?

Simon

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Posted 08 August 2007 - 07:23 AM

1) They have to be washed and many of them have nooks and crannies that hold water.

Also the surfaces when scratched and scoured can get dirt ground in that isn't very easy to get off.

Just another 2 pence worth.

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Posted 08 August 2007 - 09:02 AM

The financial comparison above is sadly unarguable.

But how about a comparison between the health risk of finding a piece of plastic in yr fishfinger as against a piece of wood ? Relative bacterial attractiveness, relative likelihood of sharpness, breakability ? I suspect plastic wins.

Rgds / Charles.C


Kind Regards,

 

Charles.C


selminay

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Posted 08 August 2007 - 12:07 PM

The financial comparison above is sadly unarguable.

But how about a comparison between the health risk of finding a piece of plastic in yr fishfinger as against a piece of wood ? Relative bacterial attractiveness, relative likelihood of sharpness, breakability ? I suspect plastic wins.

Rgds / Charles.C


My vote is to plastic pallets. At least they are more cleanable, dry easier and less tearable and breakable.

Regards,
Selmin


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Posted 09 August 2007 - 08:52 PM

My vote is to plastic pallets. At least they are more cleanable, dry easier and less tearable and breakable.

But maybe the people who have to take product off the wooden pallets at goods inward and transfer to plastic pallets and then put finished product on wooden pallets again for dispatch wouldn't agree. :unsure:

Regards,
Simon

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Posted 10 August 2007 - 04:10 AM

Dear Simon,

You’re absolutely right, it can be back-breaking work, especially where mechanical assistance is limited and you’re talking about a few thousand, 10-20kg units. There are international guidelines about such handling aspects but nonetheless, Martin’s earlier post is a typical compromise IMEX. Palletising requirement is another factor for outgoing traffic.
Seems to me this is just one part of a larger problem – are we going too far in the name of HACCP / BRC whatever. Where is the bottom line ? Then again, you look at the constant news of documented human errors …… Football is so much easier to rationalise. :whistle:
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Rgds / Charles.C


Kind Regards,

 

Charles.C


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Posted 10 August 2007 - 08:32 PM

Dear Simon,

You’re absolutely right, it can be back-breaking work, especially where mechanical assistance is limited and you’re talking about a few thousand, 10-20kg units. There are international guidelines about such handling aspects but nonetheless, Martin’s earlier post is a typical compromise IMEX. Palletising requirement is another factor for outgoing traffic.
Seems to me this is just one part of a larger problem – are we going too far in the name of HACCP / BRC whatever. Where is the bottom line ? Then again, you look at the constant news of documented human errors …… Football is so much easier to rationalise. :whistle:
.
Rgds / Charles.C

Hi Charles,

I'm not sure about football being easy to rationalise, try telling that to Franco. Anyway I agree with you about the relative ease of swapping goods from pallet to pallet depends on the availability of lifting equipment. A few years back I was visiting Italy and watched with amazement how a stores man transferred 250kg aluminium foil reels from plastic pallets to wooden crates for despatch. The lifting equipment was literally an extension of his arm; the tool went into the reel core and then opened up, he could move the reel in any direction like handling a wand. Truly amazing and clearly the right equipment for the job. Problem is most companies doing the same cost V's benefit equation would compute manual labour as the answer.

Regards,
Simon

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Posted 15 May 2008 - 10:04 PM

Hello All,

I work for a trading company that handles fresh asparagus and berries. We tried using plastic pallets in part of the shipments as a request of one or two providers, but found the following disadvantages:

1. Hard to place in the high levels of the racks - got curved
2. Not all the customers accept them yet - i.e. Costco

At least in the US the most common are the wooden pallets yet - but need to be good enough to be safe.

In packing houses they use plastic pallets while processing but the palletizing area is not in the same room.

rgds,
bertha



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Posted 20 May 2008 - 08:40 PM

Hello All,

I work for a trading company that handles fresh asparagus and berries. We tried using plastic pallets in part of the shipments as a request of one or two providers, but found the following disadvantages:

1. Hard to place in the high levels of the racks - got curved
2. Not all the customers accept them yet - i.e. Costco

At least in the US the most common are the wooden pallets yet - but need to be good enough to be safe.

In packing houses they use plastic pallets while processing but the palletizing area is not in the same room.

rgds,
bertha

Thanks for your input ultimaverde, it's good to hear the view form the states. One question how are wooden pallet standards generally controlled, do pallets have to be treated (heat/fumigation) like they do in some other countries?

Regards,
Simon

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Posted 28 May 2008 - 06:31 AM

In the UK, you would find it hard to justify to a BRC or Tesco auditor if you had wooden pallets in a high risk / high care area; this is not only because of the foreign body risk but also because of the higher incidence of water in high risk / high care and the risk of mould growth (yuk).

Here is how I have controlled it in the past in high risk / care factories:

Ingredients / packaging etc can come in on wood, ideally good quality undamaged chep pallets (added benefit of being blue so contaminants may be spotted). There must be inspection at intake and either transfer to undamaged pallets (plus a complaint to the supplier) or rejection if the pallet is unsuitable (and I have used pallet inverters in the food industry but it's better to get your suppliers on board). There must be a layer card / plastic between the pallet and the product (especially if you're looking at produce) or else you risk splinters in the food.

Due to the process flow; the food or packaging will either have to be washed, sanitised or cooked into high risk so inevitably for that it will need to be depalletised. I always have specified deboxing areas (as card can also be a risk) and the wood doesn't go past there. If you're deboxing to cook with, the ingredients then go into trays or tote bins.

Wood is then not used again until despatch where there is already the manual handling process of packing and palletising anyway; the product is already wrapped at this point.


In the ambient food industry in a plant with no barriers

I always have tried to minimise the presence of wood near open food, this means to me only using wooden pallets for packed products or ingredients (wrapped / protected as before) and not using them for work in progress. The way I've used to simply acheive this in the past is to mark out where pallets are permitted on the floor.



I hope all that is helpful. I agree with the other posters that plastic pallets are not foolproof and bring their own risks.

A word of caution. In the food industry, I have seen 3 different freezers at different companies with wood hazards in. This is because freezers normally have racking and the lazy option if using a frozen ingredient is to take a small amount out of the freezer and leave the box open (or it falls open due to the lack of adhesion on the tape due to the temperature). It's normally the small use ingredients on the bottom rack, e.g. frozen herbs and more often than not, a damaged wooden pallet is on the rack above. We once had a wood find in a meal and that's what we traced it back to. In my view the only way to really get rid of that problem is to have no racking in freezers (plastic pallets cannot be used in freezers as they become brittle.)



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Posted 28 May 2008 - 08:21 PM

Thanks for your input GMO.


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