Effective training on how to clean correctly is a foundational item that is too often overlooked. That’s why bakeries are looking for more tools to help them train their sanitation crews.

“The associates in our facilities are only able to do the best that they know how, which, at times, is not the ideal technique or approach,” said Nathan Mirdamadi, food safety manager, Commercial Food Sanitation, an Intralox company.

Karl Thorson, global food safety and sanitation manager at Minneapolis-based General Mills, is a proponent of video sanitation standard operating procedures (SSOPs) for teaching the fundamentals of the job to a large workforce.

His team at General Mills has produced 17 videos in five different languages that cover the basics of sanitation and are available to anyone, which are available on YouTube.

In many ways, he said, the short videos follow the same principles as learning how to repair a car or fix something around the house.

“You go to Google and find a YouTube video on how to do it right,” he explained. “It’s the same thing if I have to clean a mixer or a new depositor. I want to give somebody a video where they can see the best practices, they can pause the video, they can rewind it, they can jump to the chapter that they need to see. It’s a helpful tool for them.”

To develop a video SSOP library that fits a specific bakery operation, he suggested collaborating with original equipment manufacturers, tool vendors, chemical providers and other third-party suppliers to demonstrate the best practices not just for cleaning but for overall lifecycle management of equipment.

“These videos can show how to best shut down my system, dismantle it, clean it and inspect it, provide preventive maintenance and then calibrate it for starting up again,” he explained. “Our videos are very generic. They’re about how to inspect, how to dry clean and how to do foaming or titration.”

Mr. Thorson said the next step involves equipment-specific video SSOPs, such as for a horizontal bar mixer used in many General Mills bakeries.

In addition to sharing them on YouTube, they can be put into an MP4 file format and dropped into a bakery’s learning management system as a part of an ongoing training program.

“If I can develop that, there’s no reason to recreate the wheel for all these plants,” he said. “There’s going to have to be some customization because each bakery has different color-coded tools and other procedures.”

This article is an excerpt from the October 2023 issue of Baking & Snack. To read the entire feature on Sanitation, click here.