To safeguard food safety, food plant sanitation is arguably the most significant aspect in a food processing and manufacturing operation. It’s one of the critical food safety. Fundamentals and building blocks of a successful food safety management system. To ensure compliance, sanitation can’t be sporadic and uncontrolled. It has to be executed systematically and effectively as the efficacy in sanitation practices is paramount to deliver consumer safety. As a mechanism, ensuring efficacy and validation in Food Plant Sanitation always has been a daunting task. Though there are ways and strategies to validate sanitation
practices but due to its nature, sanitation effectiveness remains a tricky and sensitive process. From understanding the concept of validation to its successful application, there are challenges and bottlenecks. Validation as a concept is complicated to some and its application is challenging to practitioners. In sanitation validation, challenges are enormous, from understanding the correct method and modes of sanitation to role of sanitary design in food equipment, from understanding the role of microbes to overcoming microbiological resistance/ biofilm, from exploring allergen cleaning validation tactics to selecting the right analytical techniques and interpreting results, there are many puzzling queries and questions.

In today’s advanced world, sanitation effectiveness is not just a food safety essential but a mandatory requirement under most of the GFSI benchmarked food safety standards and schemes. Beyond just an internal food safety pre-requisite, and expectation under contemporary food safety standards, it’s also a mandatory legislative obligation under Safe Food for Canadian Regulation and US Food Laws. In the USA, under the Food Safety Modernization Act, it’s one of the proposed preventive controls.

In today’s competitive world, sanitation effectiveness is well beyond just a food safety essential. It’s a compulsory requirement under most of the GFSI benchmarked food safety standards and schemes. It’s also a mandatory legislative obligation under Safe Food for Canadian Regulation and US Food Laws – FSMA. In the USA, under the Food Safety Modernization Act, it’s one of the proposed preventive controls. In addition to exploring sanitation validation prospects, the presentation sheds light on some of the technical, scientific and practical sanitation effectiveness challenges linked to contemporary food processing and manufacturing environments. It troubleshoots and suggests solutions to managing such bottlenecks.