Food Safety and Refrigeration: What Role Does Cleaning Play?
Refrigerated cases are notoriously expensive pieces of equipment that are notoriously difficult to clean. While it might seem easiest to clean them out of convenience, Allen Randolph, SVP of customer solutions at Hamilton, Ohio-based Kaivac, sat down with Progressive Grocer to discuss why a much broader cleaning plan is necessary to ensure both the safety of the foods in them and a longer asset life.
Progressive Grocer: What are the basics for grocers to consider when it comes to food safety and refrigerated case cleaning?
Allen Randolph: I think there’s two components to refrigerated case cleaning. There's the client-facing side – the shelves, stickers, the things you can see – which are obviously very important to help present the idea of freshness. I think it’s really a huge differentiator for the brand. The client-facing experience needs to really convey both obviously, and even subliminally, that clean equals fresh, clean equals healthy.
Then, the hidden area is below the deck, it’s this open space that has all of the requirements to allow bacteria to colonize. Cleaning doesn’t prevent bacteria from being present. There’s going to be bacteria, so it’s not that you don’t want any bacteria. We’re not trying to create a sterile environment. What’s critical is that you have a cleaning process that interrupts the colonization of bacteria before it gets to a level that would create a risk to your customers or employees.
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Inside a refrigerated case, what bacteria need are time, temperature, food and moisture. They’re there in abundance, so a big part of it is having the right cleaning frequency, which should match packaging and perishability. Cilantro, for example, has no packaging and is highly perishable. Hot dogs, on the other hand, are vacuum-sealed and have a pretty long shelf life. There’s not going to be the same frequency requirements there as there would be in fresh produce. There’s going to be less foodshed, there’s going to be less organic material for that threat level to escalate.
It’s important to think about it holistically, both what the customer sees and what they don’t see. It's really about managing the risk.
PG: What comes next?
AR: Even if I agree that there’s a threat, what am I supposed to do about it? We’re thinking about it wrong. We think about the desired outcome, and then we think about the person that we’ve tasked with producing that outcome. When we don’t get the outcome, we blame the person, but that’s unfair because in between the outcome and the person is the system that we gave them to succeed.
PG: What should the system of cleaning refrigerated cases look like?
AR: The first piece is the stuff you're going to use – the tools, whether it’s Kaivac or rags and buckets and brushes. Whatever it is, you’ve got to make some choices about what you’re providing the worker. The second part of the system is the standard operating procedure (SOP). How do you use the stuff we’ve identified? How often do you use it?
Now that we’ve got a work plan for our stuff, we need to have a training methodology that goes with the SOP. How do I use the stuff, and how do I train people to do it? Now I need to give the manager some visibility into whether it happened and whether it happened correctly. The last part is putting replacements, reordering and repairs in order so you can repeat the cycle.
That sounds easy, but it is a huge Achilles heel, because rarely is there a good designated area to store cleaning stuff, and with refrigerated cases, it’s even more challenging because in most organizations, the work is assigned at the department level. Where does the stuff live, who reorders the stuff? If the meat person uses the last thing, who reorders it so produce can clean tomorrow?
All of this is broken. We’re blaming the worker for not getting the outcome without thinking about the system. When you look at your SOP, or lack thereof, then that makes this collaboration between food safety and operations and labor management start to have to come together. Stacking hands on an SOP is a necessary step, but one that requires a lot of stakeholders.
PG: Which stakeholders should be involved when getting the ball rolling on this type of plan?
AR: I would say it should start with food safety. Ultimately, it is their responsibility to protect the integrity of the food product that the brand is sending out. Food safety has a different charge than operations, and it’s that compromise that really creates the plan or, conversely, shows you where the friction point is.
In most organizations, food safety has a lot of power, but operations is directly tied to revenue and profitability. That's why we say getting people in the room early and asking the right questions is so important. Without any action, it’s definitely not going to fix itself.
There is a huge chasm between what people think is happening and what’s actually happening. People need to get a little closer to the work and determine if what they think is happening is actually happening, and if the answer is no, then you can ask yourself a third question: What should be happening?
What we typically find is that if you’re going to go to the trouble of building an SOP and a training plan, you probably aren’t going to do that around 30-year-old technology. You’re going to want to look for innovation and efficiency to make the whole thing work. It really takes somebody to say they want to know what’s going on, and that can come from a lot of places. Ultimately, labor efficiency and food safety are going to play a heavy role.
PG: Why is it so important to have all of this in place?
AR: A refrigerator is a combination of three simple systems. The first one is moving air, and the second system is cooling that air. Cooling air creates condensation, so you have to have a drainage system. Any of those can fail for any number of reasons, but cleaning can prevent that.
We’ve learned that 60% to 70% of all service requests on refrigerated cases were cleaning-related or preventable. It’s not just that you had to pay for a refrigeration technician to clean your case, but when it goes down, it’s hard to know what caused it.
If water starts to build up in the bottom, not only is it feeding into that microbial action, but it also can essentially block these other systems from working. Good cleaning would prevent all of that. You’ve got good air flow, you’ve got the ability for high-efficiency cooling, and the drainage system is free of debris and obstructions.
Additionally, if you lose a case, there’s massive business disruption. There’s always been a battle of how much inventory you put on the shelf to manage tight expiration windows. Grocers are spending a lot of time thinking about the merchandising when cleaning is a piece of that puzzle that maybe isn’t getting the same attention.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
