Equipment Maintenance and Food Safety: What You Need to Know
Ask most plant managers about why manufacturing equipment maintenance is important, and you’re likely to hear about downtime and cost control. Food safety, unfortunately, rarely comes up.
Yet along with sanitation, allergen control, food traceability and the like, equipment maintenance is a critical factor in safe food product production. As a part of Current Good Manufacturing Practices (CGMPs), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has mandated equipment maintenance as one of the risk-based preventive controls with which food manufacturers must comply. Equipment maintenance and calibration, as a function of CGMPs, is also considered key components of the GMP Prerequisite Program required by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for any Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points system.