The missing link in hygiene
In a production environment with the highest hygiene demands, a lot is invested in equipment, flooring, air quality, personal hygiene and so on. An underrated child seems - still - to be something as simple and at the same time complicated as cable glands, cables and cable trays. 'The missing link', it is sometimes said.
Yet several specialists in our country are working on this subject. Jerry Matena, for example, sales manager of Anamet - supplier of hose protection systems, often feels like a caller in the desert. "I often give lectures at companies. Then you see that there is still a lot of misunderstanding about when a situation is actually as cleanable as possible and provides as little space as possible for the growth of micro-organisms. People often see the neat bundling of cables, attaching them with tie-wraps, as a neat solution to make the cabling as hygienic as possible. But every tie-wrap and every single cable, is one too many."
Omit
The art of hygienic design is the art of omission. There should be as little surface as possible in a system on which organisms can multiply, everything should be smooth and easy to clean. This applies to all parts of a production environment, because here too, the chain is only as strong as its weakest link. For cable systems, cable bundles should be enclosed in protective tubing as much as possible, so there is only one surface to clean, instead of dozens. And cable glands and gland connections are designed so that even there only smooth, easy-to-clean transitions are created.
Blue cable protection
Several manufacturers such as Lapp, Phoenix Contact, Rittal and, of course, Anamet are constantly looking for improvements. Lapp recently introduced a new type of gland and Anamet also launched an improved version. "The hoses we use for food grade applications are constructed of FDA components that are not harmful when ingested. They are made in the colour blue for food applications, as are the seals of the glands. Blue is a colour that does not occur in any organic form, unlike, for example, white, which is used in cleanrooms. Should any material end up in production due to circumstances, it can be visually detected. This gives a very simple extra safety. It is important for the glands to be resistant to alkaline cleaning agents, which are sometimes sprayed on them with high force. Downtime in 24/7 production is often determined by the cleaning interval, so there is a lot to be gained there."
EHEDG
Matena sits on a working group of EHEDG, the European Hygienic Engineering & Design Group, the international organisation that provides guidelines on hygienic design. Board member Michael Evers: "In the Netherlands, we are not only at the forefront of food production, we are also a leader in the field of hygienic design, because it is precisely Dutch companies that are pulling the hygiene cart. EHEDG was created by Unilever in the 1980s to share and safeguard knowledge on food-safe production," he explains. "But now the European organisation has more than a thousand members, including end-users such as Coca-Cola, Cargill and Heinz and well-known machine manufacturers such as Krones and Tetra Pak. Component suppliers like Rittal and the Niedax Group to knowledge institutions like the Fraunhofer Institute are members. But Dutch companies are also widely represented. Stork (Marel), Meyn, Rademaker, Kaak Group, Lely, Dinnissen and TNO are all members.
"Collectively, Dutch machine builders account for the production of 11 per cent of all food processing machinery in the world. This puts us in third place as exporters, after Germany and Italy. Moreover, if you realise that 21 per cent of Dutch production is food-related and it is a quiet growth engine of 3 per cent per year, you understand that it takes a lot to keep up the good reputation we have built."
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