Today, food processors and packagers are faced with many challenges, but one coming up often during our conversations with food safety leaders is labor shortages. These labor shortages in the food industry have major impacts on daily operations, but there are additional risks that can negatively impact food safety such as poor hand hygiene.
How Automated Handwashing Stations Help with Food Production Staff Shortages
The last thing that any facility needs right now is a food recall due to bad hand hygiene practices, but unfortunately a constantly changing workforce only increases that risk. So how can automated hygiene technology help with this? CleanTech® Automated Handwashing Stations can help keep employees healthy, reduce food safety risks and make hygiene training easier for you and your team during this difficult time:
Automated hygiene technology helps keep employees healthy
In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, public health officials have been focused on the three Ws; wear a mask, watch your distance, and wash your hands often. Proper hand hygiene is key to prevent the spread of infection but surprisingly, the manual hand washing process is complex, with 12 different steps taking at least 20 seconds! Our hygiene expert Paul Barnhill explains these steps further in the below video:
So even though correct hand washing is one of the best ways to prevent the spread of infection, can you honestly say that each and every team member follows all of these steps for the correct amount of time, each and every time? So how can you ensure your team is washing their hands properly to decrease the risk of them getting sick and calling off work? That’s where CleanTech® comes in.
Automated handwashing stations ensure consistent pathogen removal
While poor hand hygiene is one of the top transmitters of disease, we’re not likely to follow all of the correct handwashing steps, every time we wash our hands. In fact, most people don’t wash their hands correctly every single time! So when employee turnover is high, or production staff is rushed due to labor shortages, it’s unlikely that hygiene steps will be done correctly every time.
That’s where automation can help. CleanTech® consistently removes more than 99.9% of pathogens every single time. Plus, there’s no cross contamination from user to user or from touch points like faucet handles. In fact, to be certain that our automated handwashing stations consistently remove pathogens like E.coli, Norovirus and Coronavirus to name a few, we’ve done extensive laboratory studies with a 3rd party FDA approved lab – You can download them using the button below:
Read CleanTech® Efficacy Studies
Hygiene automation makes hygiene training for food safety easy
A workforce in a rush or that is turning over quickly may not be as concerned about hygiene and understand its importance in both food safety and employee health. Often extensive training and retraining is needed to instill good hand hygiene culture amongst a team. Right now though, many plants don’t have time for this and use a method called “policing the behavior” instead. But it’s not perfect, as crucial steps can easily be overlooked when just one person is watching a large group.
Hygiene automation makes training easy! Employees just place their hands in the cylinders and in 12 seconds more than 99.9% of pathogens like Coronavirus and E.coli are removed. CleanTech® cuts handwashing time in half and is consistent. Whether it’s the employee’s first day or if they speak a different language, it doesn’t matter. Everyone gets the same perfect hand wash, every single time.
As Ahsha Abu-Ali, the Director of Food Safety at HelloFresh says:
“You have these individual sink units where you’ve had to worry about, is it going to be hot enough? It’s going to be cold enough? Are they going to actually put soap on their hands before or after? What steps are they going to follow? Are they actually going to wash their hands for 20 seconds? Whereas with this (CleanTech®) it’s you stick your hands in and it does all the work for you. So the easier you make it, the more fun it is, your employees are going to follow that.
