Standardizing your hygiene processes is a challenging project. This becomes harder when standardizing hygiene SOPs across different hygiene zones and even locations in different states or countries. Nevertheless, plants that have set their own standard hygiene practices have seen tremendous benefits that affect their food safety culture as well as overall brand image.
Standard Hygiene Practices for Food Safety
Consistent pathogen removal from employee to employee and from plant to plant is an important part of food safety. One of the bigger challenges is standardizing hygiene SOPs across a multi-layer facility with two or more hygiene zones or even multiple facilities across the country. Making sure staff in different areas and working under different shift leaders are all following hygiene SOP’s is a challenge. Standardizing the hygiene process across all a company’s plants, helps to make sure that everybody understands what consistent hygiene goals need to be. 
Standardization of automated hygiene across your organization can help to stop any potential slips in proper hygiene procedure before they happen. It has proven to be the most effective way to make sure that harmful pathogens are not entering your facility. A brand’s reputation among customers can even be strengthened by the presence of automated hygiene in your facility and demonstrate a stronger commitment to hygiene over competitors who have not implemented automated hygiene yet.
Learn more about the impacts of food safety on a brand!
Consistency of Good Hygiene Practices is Key
Standardization is really about consistency. If a hygiene process is put into place, then that sets the foundation for your organization's food safety culture. It is therefore crucial to make sure that every process implemented is simple and easily understood by all employees. A simple, automated, and standardized hygiene process develops consistency from person to person and from facility to facility.
With automation, standardizing hygiene processes for all employees becomes simple as machines do most of the work for your employees to ensure consistent hygiene events. Automated hygiene makes standardization exponentially easier for food safety leaders. Proper SOPs are simplified so that hygiene becomes a quick and even more effective process across an entire organization.
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How HelloFresh Improved Standard Hygiene Practices with Automated Hygiene
HelloFresh needed a solution to standardizing hygiene across their growing operations that overcome pitfalls they saw with the old way of employee hygiene. They previously had employees washing their hands in sink basins, which required constant policing of proper handwashing techniques from food safety supervisors. Given the large number of employees that work in their production areas as well as the large amount of foot traffic these areas saw, policing every employee proved to be an overwhelming task. Enter CleanTech®.
With the addition of CleanTech® Automated Handwashing Stations that replaced the sink basins, it was no longer necessary to monitor proper handwashing techniques since every hand wash is done the same for every employee who places their hands in the CleanTech® system. This provided HelloFresh with peace of mind for their hygiene zones and allows them to easily train new employees on handwashing with the systems across the United States.
Learn more about why automation is best for standardization in our ebook!
