Our contribution to food safety.

Metal & X-ray detectable products

One of the risk for food safety identified by HACCP is risk of phisical contamination of produced food with foreign body. To address this risk more and more companies invest in equipment detecting contamination such as metal detectors or X-ray machines. This equipment is good for detecting metals (metal detector) or contamination of high density (X-ray), but on production areas there are many other materials used which cannot be detected neither by metal detectors nor X-ray machines. To adress this risk detectable versions of objects used on production areas have been developed. Its detectability is achieved by using special metal detectable plastic or by incorporating into object aluminium or metal parts.

Blue colour

Another solution to detect potential physical contamination is to use contrasting colour which normally does not occur in natural food products. As blue colour does not naturally occur in food products it is very often used to produce objects used in food industry. This contrasting colour enables visual detection of potential food contaminant.

Colour coding

Although blue colour is the most common colour used for production of object in food industry, sometimes it is necessary to use colour coding to attribute colours to functions, departments or products. Thanks to colour coding it is possible to identify which department uses an object (eg. only QC uses red pens), divide cleaning equipment to different surfaces (eg. black brushes used for floor cleaning and blue brushes used for production line) or attribute colours to ingredients which cannot be mixed with other to avoid cross contamination (eg. special colours used for quiment dedicated for allergens).

Equipment personalisation

Attributing colours to different objects or functions is limited by number of clearly distinguishable colours. However very often there is a need for further increase of food safety by attribution of equipment to small groups of employees or even individual employees. This can be achieved by engraving or printing individual numbers to equipment and employees who are using it. When it is written in register that product is attributed to an employee he will pay special attention to avoid loosing an item. If he looses it all the problems and consequent costs can be easily linked to individual employee.

Shadow boards and 5S

Another way to make sure that risk of contamination is reduced is keeping production area nice and tidy. A nice tool to keep everything in order are shadow boards, which visually present dedicated place for individual objects. When we can see that each objects is stored on its place we are sure that it did not contaminate produced food. Another benefit of shadow boards and other 5S tools is elimination of time waste to seach for tools and equipment.

Food safety comics.

Food safety is a very serious issue which should be seriously treated by all parties in food production starting from a blue collar worker to president of a company. Althouth it is as serious issue it does not mean that we cannot talk about it in a funny way. More over if we communicate it in a playful way we can reach the people who have difficulties in absorbtion of difficult language used in proceduers. Therefore we decided to communicate food safety issues with funny comics, which present not only our products but also other food safety issues.

BRC and other food safety systems

As BRC is one of the most detailed food safety systems (exluding detailed systems of individual companies) we decided to link our products to individual requirements of BRC. Whenever we develop new products we also are trying to address specific BRC requirement. Sometimes BRC specifies exactly our products like blue detectable plasters or ban to use metal staples. In other situations BRC only identify risk and our products are one of possible solutions. In both cases we try to link our product to specific BRC requirements to help our customers to fulfill those requirements.