Most if not all manufacturers of foods and food ingredients will claim that their product is safe and that it has been manufactured by a food safety-controlled process. After all, how can one assure foods or food ingredients are safe if the production method used to make them, is not controlled? To help food (ingredient) manufacturers developing processes that are supposedly intrinsically safe, standards have been developed, not just for end products but also for manufacturing processes, process design and equipment specification.
That’s, however, where the uniformity ends: the food industry is riddled with a multitude of standards, every single one of them presuming to offer optimal solutions for manufacturers’ many food safety challenges. While these standards are supposed to make food production life easier, we’ve seen businesses in the food industry struggling with these standards; aiming to do the right thing and buying equipment with all the right certificates (and often too many certificates) but having it connected so poorly that the benefits of hygienically designed equipment are lost on poorly designed interconnecting pipework.
Aiming to make our mark in the food industry, Prove Engineering committed to EHEDG-guidelines 2 years ago. Although our clients have benefitted from them, EHEDG-guidelines are quite top-level and are often lacking practical handles for hygienic engineering and an integrated hygienic process design methodology. Some of the players in the food manufacturing industry, from equipment suppliers and food process engineering contractors, have decided to unite themselves in HDN, the hygienic design network. HDN does not compete with EHEDG; instead, it adopts EHEDG-guidelines and, issues practical guidelines and – depending on the application – prescribes standardised equipment and piping for integrated hygienic food production process design.
Favouring hands-on over top-level guidelines, we decided to participate in this HDN-network at the end of last year. To mark the occasion, Elwin has followed a 5-day course in hygienic process design at HDN in January and has passed the concluding exam, making Prove Engineering a certified member of the Hygienic Design Network.
