Hygienic design of a unit for supercritical fluid drying – case study

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the hygienic design of a scalable unit for supercritical carbon dioxide drying of food.

For the purpose of this study, a checklist has been developed, covering requirements from sanitary standards and industry-tailored guidelines. Beyond hygienic design, failure mode and effects analysis of the results were performed to assess the potential food safety risks that may arise from failures to hygienic design requirements.

The overall score of the hygienic design was 46 percent. This kind of evaluation revealed two types of nonconformities. The first type was related to inadequate sanitary procedures. The second type was associated to design failures.

The highest risk was designated to problems related to cleaning and sanitation followed by risks associated with the formation of dead zones and biofilms.

This study provides valuable insight to engineers and food technologists on hygienic design issues.

Application of a similar methodology was used for evaluating hygienic design of other non-thermal food technologies.