A master cleaning schedule is not supposed to be complicated. It is supposed to answer a few very simple questions, such as what needs to be cleaned, how often it needs to be cleaned, and who is responsible for cleaning it.
Though these are simple questions on their own, they are excruciatingly important when you’re building a food safety program. Allocating cleaning tasks can’t occur on an “as needed” basis, otherwise things get rushed, the team feels pressure to get it right even though production is breathing down their necks, and little details get forgotten.
Master sanitation schedules don’t only keep things cleaner, they take a lot of the hassle out of the equation. If everything is planned ahead of time, all you have to do is check that the procedures are being followed.
What Goes Into a Master Cleaning Schedule?
Food contact surfaces, floors, walls, drains, light fixtures, storage spaces, loading docks, utensils, cutting boards, equipment, tools, waste areas, and hard-to-reach spaces. It’s a lot. Daily cleaning should be a lot. If it is part of the facility and it can collect debris, dust, raw materials, residue, moisture, or pest activity, it probably belongs somewhere on the schedule, because if it isn’t there, it will get missed, and then your products and your team will suffer.
A properly constructed schedule will also cover the frequency of each cleaning task, because not everything has to be done every single day. It’s all about the risk level.
Assign Responsibilities Clearly
You already know this, but every task has to be assigned or it will go by the wayside. Different teams can assist, including sanitation, production, maintenance, quality assurance, warehouse employees, or an outside contractor, but the point is that someone has to get the assignment in their hands. Ideally, backup personnel should be listed too, because people get sick, shifts change, and real life does what real life does, which is cause setbacks.
Zone-Based Cleaning Helps
Proper cleaning in the food production world is very specific. Breaking the facility down into zones can help keep your sanitation procedures effective and easy to implement. You can use color codes to assist with preventing cross-contamination from those high-risk areas (raw material areas, allergen areas, etc) to the low-risk ones (finished product spaces, storage spaces, employee areas). A brush used with the raw materials cannot unabashedly end up in the finished product area, or you have health regulations blaring warning signs.
Verification and Documentation
Regular cleaning needs to be signed off by someone in charge. It doesn’t have to be on paper, per se, but it does have to be in your system. We like digital cleaning schedules because they can have tools like automated reminders, track completion, allow mobile sign-off, and centralize cleaning data.
But all the best software in the world isn’t useful if things aren’t being done. This is why we verify. Verification through means such as visual inspection, ATP testing, microbiological swabbing, allergen testing, product testing, and environmental monitoring can all help approve and confirm the cleaning effectiveness. If something fails, corrective actions should be taken and documented, that way, you can do better next time.
Validation and Re-Validation
Seems redundant, yes. The thing is, if you aren’t always looking for ways to improve, or if you aren’t answering the question, “Is this cleaning method working for us?” with validation and documentation, you could very well miss out on chances to do better. On the other hand, you could always be second-guessing yourself, wondering if anything is really getting clean, or if all the procedural changes, equipment changes, chemical changes, and production changes were for naught. With a good plan, you can have security and peace of mind, so that when an inspection rolls around, you know just how to handle it.
Keep Improving the Schedule
A master cleaning schedule isn’t something to write and then forget about. Yes, it’s easy to get into a routine and let that binder gather dust, but the data has to be taken into account. Review the plan after audits, customer complaints, pest issues, environmental monitoring positives, product changes, equipment changes, and sanitation failures. Adjust the cleaning frequency when the data says it is needed so that your team can be the best version of itself.
HMS helps food manufacturers build sanitation programs that make sense in the real world. We can help create a master cleaning schedule, review cleaning procedures, assign responsibilities, connect tasks to SSOPs, and improve documentation.