A prominent food processor in North America produces more than 20 million frozen pizzas and baked goods annually. The local plant management was constantly seeking for ways to minimize downtime and boost production rates due to an increase in demand. Labor shortages in the cleaning and sanitation crew also led the plant to seek ways to more efficiently allocate their time and activities.
It was identified that a lot of time was being spent scrubbing and scraping the cheese melters and belt lines due to heavy soil load, sometimes preventing on-time production startup. By cleaning the equipment faster, the plant could use the additional time to start production earlier.
The current cleaning procedures were the following:
- Cheese Melter, every day
- 1 employee
- 2 hours manual scraping
- Belt Lines, every 2 weeks
- 4 employees
- 4 hours manual scraping
After consulting with the Ecolab Account Manager, the plant management decided to use Exelerate™ TUFSOIL, a ready-to-use heavy duty gel cleaner and degreaser, to tackle their hard-to-remove protein and carbohydrate soils. The success criteria were the following:
- Reduce the time spent scraping and cleaning the cheese melters and belt lines to more efficiently allocate employees’ time.
- Minimize safety risks during application of chemistry.
