Single Use Food Contact Glove Usage

Good Morning -

I wanted to throw a topic out here for discussion on what everyone does inside their plants.

Do you allow your employees to wear their food contact single use gloves while doing a task that requires touching a non-food contact surface? i.e. writing with a pen, using a fork lift, using a broom, etc?

My thought process on this is to train employees to ONLY use food contacting gloves when performing food contact duties. This reduces the risk of them accidentally going back to a task of food handling without changing their gloves.

What is everyone thoughts or even current practices on this?

Hi PetBone,

In my plant employees have to change gloves when moving from food handling to non food handling task - so would change gloves when moving from line to forklift, using cleaning equipment etc. - and then change again when moving from non food to food contact work.

The exception would be for using a pen to complete line paperwork as long as they are filling in paperwork as part of on line checks then we do not make them change gloves.

S

Scary thing about gloves is that it gives people a sense of false security. Because I have on gloves means that no matter what I do with my hands my gloves will be clean or vice versa. It takes training, and you being on the floor to tell people "wash your hands, change your gloves". 

When to change gloves would be based off a risk assessment. Here's an example:

When a floor associate sweeps (uses a broom)

• Is the broom handle/broom itself stored up off the floor?
• Is the dustpan stored off the floor?
• While throwing away waste, does the operator touch the trash can?
• While sweeping, is product residual possible of touching the glove?
• Is the broom handle on a Sanitation Schedule. If so, what are the results (history)?
• Is the broom handle cleanable i.e. not made of wood?
• Is the broom used outside of the production room i.e. lunchroom, warehouse, outside?

Too often staff see gloves as "magic".  We always provide extensive training and monitoring on this issue. 

Dear PetBone,

My thought process on this is to train employees to ONLY use food contacting gloves when performing food contact duties.

You might be surprised to know that many food handlers do not use any hand covering at all. Chefs ? Clearly the cheapest option, at least in the first instance.

Rgds / Charles.C

If you'd like to see a good long thread on hand washing versus gloves check this thread out: http://www.ifsqn.com...us-handwashing/

I am not trying to debate hand washing vs. glove usage as it is our policy to wear gloves when handling food (I would never win that battle). I was just hoping to find out how the industry is handling tasks that are not food-contact when they require gloves for food handling.

I do agree that gloves give a false sense of security when worn.

We only allow our employees to use food contact gloves when toughing food. 

That means if they're touching the mixer handle, or the equipment cart handle, they can't have on food contact gloves.   Tragically, they had been trained by our sister company's megac*** QA to "Always have gloves on in the production room", and were terrified to be in the room without gloves (even though they are touching a LOT of not food stuff!).  One started crying when he was telling me about her last visit.  A grown man.  They also claimed that the gloves were being used a PPE to protect against paper cuts, etc (to be fair, we do handle a lot of packaged product and that is an actual hazard / annoyance)

It was pretty hard to control, because we had no visual cue as to if an employee was supposed to be touching food contact or nonfood contact.  We ended up with different colored nitrile gloves that match our color coding - green for food contact, blue for non-food contact.  Now if someone is touching a FILTHY EQUIPMENT CONSOLE BUTTON with a green glove I know they didn't remove it and can properly shame them in front of their peers.   Also, it turns out the green gloves were textured, and employees looooove them now. 

I had some push back from purchasing because green gloves were slightly more expensive than blue gloves (And then someone from the other factory called me CRAZY, but that person was wrong, becuase our auditor loooved it just like the employees did) .  But not that expensive.  The alternative is only letting them wear gloves when touching food, which in my opinion is the best option.

We only allow our employees to use food contact gloves when toughing food. 

 

That means if they're touching the mixer handle, or the equipment cart handle, they can't have on food contact gloves.   Tragically, they had been trained by our sister company's megac*** QA to "Always have gloves on in the production room", and were terrified to be in the room without gloves (even though they are touching a LOT of not food stuff!).  One started crying when he was telling me about her last visit.  A grown man.  They also claimed that the gloves were being used a PPE to protect against paper cuts, etc (to be fair, we do handle a lot of packaged product and that is an actual hazard / annoyance)

 

It was pretty hard to control, because we had no visual cue as to if an employee was supposed to be touching food contact or nonfood contact.  We ended up with different colored nitrile gloves that match our color coding - green for food contact, blue for non-food contact.  Now if someone is touching a FILTHY EQUIPMENT CONSOLE BUTTON with a green glove I know they didn't remove it and can properly shame them in front of their peers.   Also, it turns out the green gloves were textured, and employees looooove them now. 

 

I had some push back from purchasing because green gloves were slightly more expensive than blue gloves (And then someone from the other factory called me CRAZY, but that person was wrong, becuase our auditor loooved it just like the employees did) .  But not that expensive.  The alternative is only letting them wear gloves when touching food, which in my opinion is the best option.

I actually really like this idea of dealing with this concern. As another one of our issues is the fact that we do not have too many hand washing stations conveniently located to work stations. As long as the glove is not ripped, we would then be able to remove 1 set of gloves, sanitize hands and place a new set of gloves on of a different color.

Yes, Magenta different color coded gloves is something we had to revert to as well. Since the maintenance personnel have an outside shop (for heavy maintenance such as grinding, welding), they would work outside with those gloves get a call to work on something inside the processing. Problem is I would always see at least one particular maintenance person walk into any given production room with torn nitrile gloves "ready to work".

Besides maintenance having their own tool box for outside work, the swarf mat before entering, they also had their own colored gloves for working outside. So much control since they do have access to every possible area of the plant including processing. Our highest risk of cross contamination/foreign material.

Believe me if we could wash down, scrub down, decontam, fumigate, sterilize, vacuum seal maintenance I would.

Gloves can get as dirty and contaminated as your hand.  Doing adequate risk analysis and risk control will determine when you need to change gloves.

If someone handles food and then uses a pen, the pen is now possibly contaminated with food.  Whoever uses the pen next could then pick up the food and transfer it to somewhere else.