To provide standard and superiority food for consumers regularly, comprises of many practices from production, processing to packaging stages. In this practice, hygiene, a vital procedure has been implicated, which is necessary in the food processing circumstances for standard food. Hygiene can be abided either by cleaning, sterilizing, disinfecting, or placing in extreme temperatures. Still the complication is around whether choosing of manual or machine work for whole food plant hygiene.
Suppose maintaining cleanliness manually in high scale is a challenging process as well as impossible for dismantling and manually clean the piping and equipment. To begin with production, cleaning is the foremost step for preparing the processed line of products. Sequentially, it can be attained by CIP (clean in Place) unit has been efficient segment of any food processing plant.
What is CIP?
Cleaning in place, short as CIP is a set of procedures used to properly cleaning the processing equipment without removal of pipes or equipment in practice of food plant hygiene. In all facilities CIP requirements are unique. The elements, sequence, and duration of the process varies from system to system, but few common steps are incorporated in most cycles are enumerated below.
Common phases in CIP cycle
- Pre-rinse
– First step in the cycle that takes the responsibility for physically cleaning the equipment. Discards most remaining visible residues in production lines along with dissolves sugars and partially melts the fat.
- Caustic wash
– Soften fats. The alkali used in caustic washes has a high pH concentration of 0.5-2.0%. Most times water can be saved by, the caustic wash can be returned to its tank and reused multiple times.
- Intermediate rinse
– In case the traces of remaining caustic are available, that can be flushed from the system by fresh water or rinse recovery tank.
- Final rinse
– Flushes out residual cleaning agents. Some cases water saving is applied by final rinse can be recovered and re-used as pre-rinse solution for the next cleaning cycle.
- Sanitizing rinse
– Assist in killing the microorganisms before next production run. Major task is of picking the suitable disinfection for destroying or sterilizing the fungi or bacteria.
Since every cycle has unique parameters, some facilities choose to do some or all of these optional stepsTrack FMT magazine for more engaging info of food plant hygiene
