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Foodservice

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Five Steps to Developing the Most Effective Food Processing Emergency Response Plan

You’ve conducted the required emergency response training with your employees — but are they truly prepared for an incident? Recognizing that government-mandated training is often not enough, many food processing safety managers are going above and beyond mandated requirements and customizing training to ensure employees are prepared for a range of unexpected scenarios. Below are five key steps you can take to ensure your employees are prepared for any emergency:

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Views: 491

Federal Regulators Target Hazardous Chemical Safety

On August 1, 2013, President Obama signed an Executive Order on Improving Chemical Facility Safety and Security designed to reduce the risks of hazardous chemicals. While many food processing plants already have controls and processes in place to ensure chemical safety, tightened regulations and increased risks have encouraged many plant owners to take a second look at their programs.

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Which Emergency Response Plan Is Right For Your Plant?

Food processing plants can do everything within their power to prevent an ammonia leak, from conducting proper maintenance and inspections to having the appropriate safety systems in place such as alarms, shut-offs, and overrides. Yet accidental leaks and spills can occur, so it’s important to be prepared with an emergency response plan.

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The Three Ps of Preparing for Natural Disasters: Plan, Partner and Prioritize

Natural disasters can wreak havoc on a food processing facility, not only causing physical damage to the building, but also resulting in a huge economic loss in product and production downtime. Planning for a natural disaster has to be strategic and should include partners from your local emergency response teams, vendors and designated employees.

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Views: 1175

Four Ways BIM Allows Food Facilities to Make Better Decisions During Design Review

When performing a design review, BIM gives all of your food processing plant’s stakeholders — operations, maintenance, safety, and engineering teams — an opportunity to explore the facility in a three-dimensional mode. Viewing the design in this 3D model helps visualize the building space so owners can make more informed decisions in these areas:

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Should Your Plant Use Building Information Modeling (BIM) For Your Next Design Project?

A virtual walk-through using BIM

 

Food processing plants are embracing business information modeling (BIM) as the new standard in facility design. BIM’s three-dimensional format allows designers to give plant owners, managers and employees a virtual walk-through of the facility. By viewing virtual construction elements such as walls, windows, slabs and roofs, they can then make the most informed decisions on process and work flows.

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Best Practices for Developing a Food Processing Plant Utility Matrix

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Every single piece of equipment in a food processing facility – from processing equipment to compressors, chillers and the machine room – requires some form of power whether it’s electricity, steam, hot water, or compressed air. Determining the utility requirements of the plant’s operating systems is a critical part of the design process that involves the plant’s owner, as well as the mechanical and electrical engineering team.

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Views: 867

How Product, Product Mix and Production Volume Impact Design

Preliminary discussions with your food processing plant architects should include a thorough discussion of your sales and marketing goals. Your plant’s specific products, product mixes (including future products), and production volume all impact decisions made during the design process.

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Four Key Budget Considerations in Designing Your Plant’s Mechanical System

It is critical to plan for the future when designing your food processing plant’s mechanical systems. We find that many plants are now undergoing expensive retrofits because future needs were not appropriately considered. Not only are retrofits expensive, but if new equipment is not sized and sequenced effectively, it can significantly affect your energy costs. To avoid these issues, here are four budget considerations to address when designing your plant’s mechanical system:

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