The first duty of any food or drink manufacturer is to supply consumers with safe products. While it is essential to maintain good equipment hygiene through the use of effective protocols, such as clean-in-place (CIP) systems, it is also economically important that perfectly usable product is not discarded as part of routine cleaning operations.
CIP systems for processing equipment, such as pipework, heat exchangers, pasteurizers, fillers, pumps, etc, offer a number of advantages over manually disassembling, cleaning, checking and then re-assembling plant. Not only are they much quicker, and less labor intensive, but they also reduce costs and allow more frequent and therefore more effective routine cleaning of systems to be carried out. There are many different types of mechanical and automatic cleaners employed in the food industry, but before any CIP can be carried out, as much product as possible must be removed from the equipment to be cleaned.