Clean in Place is exactly what it sounds like, most of the time. It is a cleaning process that cleans the inside of process equipment without forcing your team to break everything down to its most basic form. It might not sound like a big deal, but it gets real quickly whenever your production team is losing hours faster than you can recover them.
Clean in Place (CIP) is harnessed across food and beverage, dairy, pharmaceutical manufacturing, cosmetics, and all other processing industries where effective cleaning is not up to the team’s discretion. The goal is to remove food residue, cleaning soils, mineral deposits, and harmful microorganisms from interior food contact surfaces without turning a thorough cleaning into an all-day downtime extravaganza.
Why CIP Systems Matter in the Food Industry and the Dairy Industry
Food safety is the primary reason automated CIP systems will be relevant until the end of time. Physical matter left behind in process lines can become a cozy home for bacteria, allergens, and other uninvited guests that should have no place in your products. The hard truth is that manual cleaning procedures cost time, money, and frustration. Especially with dairy, where milk and cream are a main cause for microbiological concerns, CIP will always be an acceptable solution. Beverage operations use this cleaning equipment in tanks, transfer lines, fillers, and heat exchangers. Food processing facilities use CIP technology in every place where closed equipment needs consistent cleaning without consistent teardown.
Cleaner equipment isn’t the only upside, in case you thought we were done. This automated cleaning system can reduce cleaning time, lower labor needs, improve employee safety, and reduce manual handling of caustic or acidic chemicals. The initial investment numbers might make you feel intimidated, but they pay for themselves in a staggeringly short amount of time. We have seen it in action more than enough times to say with confidence that it is worth it.
The Typical CIP Cycle
A characteristic CIP cycle may take anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours. What the CIP system does in this time hinges on the product, the equipment, the soil load, the size of the interior surfaces, and how clean the system needs to be before production resets.
Basically, a well-designed CIP system may include a pre-rinse, caustic wash, intermediate rinse, acid solution, final rinse, sanitizer, and drying or air purge. Different industries may use different steps. For example, dairy and pharmaceutical organizations will, many times, use more involved cleaning cycles, sometimes seven steps, because the cleaning requirements are so much stricter.
A 1-step CIP process may be sufficient in some personal care or lower-risk applications. A 3-step process may include rinse, wash, and final rinse. A 5-step CIP process is routine in food industry applications because it can embrace both the caustic and acid cleaning steps. The 7-step process is more common where residue control, microbiology, and documentation are the heavy hitters.
Cleaning Solutions and Cleaning Agents
A good CIP team will know what you need and how to apply it. There are endless options for cleaning chemicals out there, but every single one of them has little specifications that make it the right (or the very wrong) choice for you. You can’t be expected to know all that, but we can.
For example:
- Caustic solution, often sodium hydroxide, helps remove fats, proteins, and organic soils. Caustic concentrations are popularly used in the 1 to 4 percent range.
- Acidic cleaning agents help remove mineral deposits. Nitric, phosphoric, and citric acids all emerge in CIP operations, but they’re dependent on the system design and materials involved.
- Sanitizers reveal themselves after the cleaning has done its job. Peracetic acid is one common option because it helps annihilate bacteria and viruses before the next production run.
These chemicals are often stored in drums or IBC tanks before use. We can conclude, then, that personnel safety matters. Chemical storage, transfer, dosing, ventilation, training, and spill planning are all involved in the final plan. After all, the CIP cleaning process is automated, but people are still in the vicinity.
Documentation and Next Steps
Doing all the right things, such as having stainless steel surfaces and CIP systems, making sure they stay pristine, doesn’t let you off the hook. Documentation, though not particularly fun, is a requirement for your program. Facilities should record cycle times, chemical concentration, temperatures, rinse results, corrective actions, and any failed cleaning events. If you have automatic cleaning, that documentation could be captured through controls, but if not, someone has to ensure it gets written down.
HMS can help you review all your current processes and implement stellar upgrades such as CIP. From adding new equipment, changing products, fighting residue problems, or spending too much time on cleaning, HMS can help review your CIP process, system design, cleaning procedures, and equipment layout. We are the people who will stand by you every step of the way.