Cleanrooms have long been used in the pharmaceutical, microelectronics and biotechnology industry, but recently the food industry has shown an increasing interest in modern cleanrooms. This is no coincidence, as consumer society demands more and more ready-to-eat foods that are preserved, using special processes.
Benefits?
Food industry procedures are characterised by strict rules and extremely high hygiene standards. Modern cleanrooms gradually elevate the level of general hygiene in the food industry. By minimising the number of germs and fungi, not only can product quality improve, processes can be simplified and production times reduced. A greater efficiency results in higher profit margins.
Food companies using cleanrooms enjoy a variety of benefits, from an increased efficiency in production, due to an improved shelf life, to showing the clean production method on the packaging, which is beneficial to marketing.
Typical applications
The main users of cleanrooms are food, meat and dairy processing plants and specialty food processing companies (gluten and lactose free and anti-allergic foods).
Unique to food
The temperature in these clean rooms is strictly controlled, along with the humidity and number of particles in the air. Such an extremely sterile and controlled environment provides a safe place for food products to be produced, processed and packaged, enabling the manufacturer to increase the shelf life of the product by significantly reducing the number of germs in a cleanroom.
As is the case for any other applications, most cleanrooms used in the food industry are custom made, taking into account the space and the equipment needed to produce food products. The extremely high standards require that the manufacturer works closely with the investor, developing a design that is suitable for the production process.
