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Seafood

Views: 1860

Are Your Doors Wasting Your Food Plant’s Energy?

Did you know a single weak link in your building envelope can have a major impact on your food plant’s energy efficiency? Take your facility’s doors and door openings. In an otherwise well-insulated and well-designed facility, an improperly designed door opening can erase a big portion of energy and utility savings. Your entire building envelope, from the windows to the walls, must be tightly sealed to achieve the utmost energy efficiency—including the doors.

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Views: 3806

5 Keys to Forming a Comprehensive Food Plant Emergency Action Plan

Your food processing facility’s commitment to safety starts with being prepared. How do you prepared to be… prepared? With your food plant’s emergency action plan (EAP): a required Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) document that defines employer and employee actions during workplace emergencies. While emergency action plans that meet minimum requirements may include emergency information and procedures, they still may not contain enough detail to ensure the safest response to dangerous situations. Your plan must be comprehensive, eliminating all confusion and hesitancy in case of an emergency. A non-comprehensive plan — one lacking extensive instruction or failing to address each emergency — may add confusion to the situation.

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Views: 2678

[Infographic] 5 Important Factors for Selecting a Site for Your New Food Plant

When choosing the ideal site for your new food plant, your decision should always tie back to a single question: How will this site help my business thrive? Build a sound business plan around the type and quantity of goods your facility will produce, and use that plan to guide you through your site selection. You’ll need to address several factors throughout your search, most of important of which are the five core factors illustrated in the infographic below:

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Views: 15720

Cryogenic vs. Mechanical Freezers: The Best Uses for Each Method

Many food plants rely on freezers and refrigerators to store and ship their products. In last week’s post, I outlined four variables food processors must understand during process freezing. This week, I want to take a look at freezing methods and equipment, and the applications they’re best suited for. Depending on the type and quantity of food, certain freezers are more useful than others.

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Views: 2820

5 Tips for Automating Your Food Processing Plant

Total automation may be an ideal for most food processors, but it can be difficult to determine how to connect every system in a food plant—or if they should even be connected at all. To optimize ROI, it’s important to learn which areas of your food processing facility are best suited for automation. Below are five tips for improving your plant’s automation capabilities.

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What Food Processors Should Know About 2 New FSMA Final Rules

The FDA recently released new final Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) rules. These rules are the result of amendments made to the original proposals, based on comments and criticisms in public forums. Below are important details of two rules. You can find a full explanation of each new rule here.

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Views: 1127

Three Reasons to Consider a Behavior-based Approach to Worker Safety

In last week’s post, I introduced you to the behavior-based approach to worker safety. While ergonomic design and regulatory compliance remain critical to worker safety, behavior-based safety strategies incentivize employees to take ownership of their own safety. Employees proactively identify potential hazards, helping prevent them from ever happening in the first place.

Below, I outline in more detail three reasons you should integrate a behavior-based approach into your food plant’s worker safety practices.

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Views: 1292

How a Behavior-based Approach Can Enhance Your Worker Safety Culture

Worker safety is a critical element in every food plant, regardless of the type of products manufactured. And while creating a safe, ergonomic work environment is a must, sometimes it’s not enough to ensure the safety of your most important asset—your employees.

In a recent Food Engineering article on ergonomic practices, I discussed how a behavior-based approach can enhance your plant’s worker safety. With behavior-based safety training, workers are incentivized to proactively look for potential hazards, creating a safety-oriented workforce.

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5 Details to Give Your Design-Builder for a More Accurate Food Project Budget

At this time of year, many food processors are planning next year’s capital expenditures, which often means piecing together budgets for upcoming food plant construction projects. It is important to create the most accurate budget possible: a tricky task. Frequently, food processors prepare budgets without the assistance of an experienced design-builder. By doing so, they make assumptions that can skew their entire budget.

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