The Importance of Safety in a Food Manufacturing Environment
Safety is an essential part of food manufacturing, especially when shipping products. Learn more about it in this brief overview.
The packaged food industry was worth around $1.03 trillion in 2021. Food manufacturing will always be important because people always need to eat. Food manufacturers need to be very careful when preparing and shipping food.
This is because this process can be dangerous if certain protocols aren’t followed. But what dangers are there in the food manufacturing service industry? Keep reading and learn more about how it works below.
Why Safety Is Important in the Food Manufacturing Industry
The point of food manufacturing services is to produce and ship food that people can eat. This may seem like a simple process, but it isn’t. This is because great care needs to be taken into consideration when manufacturing food.
Suppose there is an assembly line that turns ground meat into sausages. Machines mostly do the work, while human workers may sort and check the products. The machines that do this may be old and they may not have been checked in a while.
A scrap of metal from one of these machines could end up in the ground meat, which is then turned into a sausage. This sausage is then shipped out with thousands of other packets until it makes it into someone’s meal. Whoever eats it could get seriously injured when biting into a sausage with a slice of metal in it.
This may prompt that person to sue the company that made the sausages. This is only one example of what could happen if safety isn’t considered in the food manufacturing industry. Many food manufacturing companies follow rules and regulations to ensure that the food they produce is as safe as possible.
How It Works
The safety of the workers is important, too. A worker could easily slice their finger on something while on the assembly line. While food workers wear nitrile or latex gloves to protect themselves, this might not be enough to protect them from injuries.
A drop of blood from a simple cut could contaminate thousands of dollars of food on an assembly line. The preparation of food is also important. Certain foods are more likely to harbor dangerous bacteria.
Consider chicken or salmon. These are two foods that often have harmful bacteria like salmonella. Workers need to be careful when interacting with these foods as they could get infected if they’re too aloof.
These foods also need to be prepared and be as clean as possible before they are shipped out to grocery stores and markets. Special packaging also needs to be used to ensure that nothing touches the food when it’s time to ship it out.
Plastic packaging is the most popular, but glass and cardboard options are sometimes used as well. If the packaging breaks, the food inside may no longer be safe to eat.
The Dangers of Food Manufacturing
Many things could go wrong in the food manufacturing industry. The food could get contaminated by metal and other stray objects. Workers on an assembly line could also get injured if they’re not careful.
Food may also get contaminated if the packaging isn’t secure. To learn more about different industries, check out our content.
