Sanitary Process Installation: What to Ask When Selecting a Subcontractor

Equipment manufacturers play a key role in the food safety program of a food processing plant, ensuring that equipment is designed and built to meet stringent sanitary requirements. Plant owners often spend significant time and money to acquire the right equipment with the proper sanitary construction. Yet once that equipment is designed and delivered, the next critical step is ensuring that it’s installed properly, within those same sanitary standards. If you do not carefully screen installation subcontractors, you could put your plant at risk of a food safety issue.

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Green Globes ® Gains Traction as Alternative to LEED ®

For many companies, obtaining LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification is often too costly, and the documentation process too cumbersome, to warrant the effort. While not as well recognized, Green Globes is gaining traction as a less-expensive and more user-friendly alternative to LEED certification. Established in the U.S. in 2004, Green Globes is administered by the Green Building Initiative (GBI).

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When to Conduct a Feasibility Study For Major Plant Decisions

In this day and age of fierce competition and tighter budgets, food manufacturers are often faced with making critical—and expensive—business decisions as part of their strategic plan. Should you refurbish existing equipment or buy new equipment to meet your manufacturing needs? Should you add product lines to increase market share and what impact would that have on current operations?

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The Three Stages of Master Planning For Food Processing Facilities

A proposed process plant schematic showing initial and future phases

 

What will your food processing facility look like in the future based on your growth projections? Will you expand your current facility, buy and develop adjacent property or will it be necessary to embark on a greenfield project? A master plan—a comprehensive three-to-five-year plan that determines your facility’s physical and site requirements based on growth projections—can help answer these questions.

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Three Steps in Developing a Food Processing Manufacturing Plan

Developing a manufacturing plan is generally the second phase in the strategic planning process. After creating a business plan and specifying your food processing plant’s sales and growth projections, a manufacturing plan will identify and assess the processes that are used to manufacture the product to meet those sales goals.

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Key Elements to Include in Your Food Processing Facility’s Business Plan

Most strategic plans begin with the development of a business plan, a methodical process where all aspects of the business are defined and analyzed against the company’s business objectives. Food processing companies develop business plans at different stages of their life cycle, especially in preparation to launch a new product line, invest in a facility expansion or to identify new growth opportunities.

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Six Key Benefits of Insulated Metal Panel Walls

Insulated metal panels (IMPs) installed on a building exterior provide an excellent thermal envelope. In contrast to other envelope assemblies, IMPs more effectively reduce thermal bridging. With the industry continually striving to build more sustainable designs, IMPs are by far the best and most thermally efficient product available today.

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Factors to Consider When Selecting Doors for Your Food Processing Plant

Selecting the proper doors for your cold storage facility is an important part of the decision process for your building envelope. Your food plant design firm will want to look at all aspects of your plant’s operations to determine the most appropriate door types and materials. Installing the proper door will have a positive impact on the facility’s energy costs and productivity, while selecting the wrong type of door can result in down time, costly damage, and unsafe conditions.

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