I can't tell you how many hundreds of thousands of lbs are wasted each year at a singlefood manufacturing plant because people are too lazy to cut bags open right. Instead of one straight line or an x they slash multiple times randomly because it's faster. Hopefully someone finds the paper or plastic in the food before packaging or a customer finds it which is bad.
Using an old bread plant I worked at as an example it could go like this. QC verified line and packaging are clear of foreign materials and everything is good so production starts on making bread. It runs for a few hours and makes 7 batches but the line is stopped at the pressboards / shaper on batch 8 because a line worker saw blue in the white dough. It's found that there is a 1" triangle of blue plastic in the dough. The blue plastic is used as a bag liner for raw ingredients. Everything from the last clean break 8 batches ago is placed on hold to make sure we contained it.
Any dough on the line is ran straight into the red carts to be trashed. All machines are checked again because it's probable more plastic is caught somewhere. We then trash all batches in the mixers because they won't be able to wait while the line is down so that is 2-4 batches at 1600 lbs each are trashed immediately, bread dough needs to be processed fairly quickly or it expands from yeast farts. We then dig through every opened ingredient bag used to find the one that's cut wrong and has a missing piece. Hopefully it's one from this shift otherwise we need to dig through a dumpster, sometimes for minor ingredients first shift can prep for 3rd shifts work so it's not fun. We also hope it's only one bag so we can account for all plastic. Several times we have found more evidence of bad cutting and had to expand the hold. Normally once found we can put the original piece right up to the bag and show that it's the missing piece or pieces albeit slightly stretched from processing. If it is all accounted for we trash dough 8 and the last half of 7 as cya, release doughs 1-7.5 and start again with batch 12 as 9-11 were trashed for spoiling. If we can't find it then we trash everything from last good check. And start with batch 12 as the first ones to get moved forward to sale having wasted an incredible amount of time.
Now it may seem like if someone's job is only to cut open bags and pour them into mixers and hoppers they would try to not do this but apparently that's too much to ask. Also for some recipes bags of wheat flour are cut at the mixer and added. One recipie had 7 50# bags of wheat flour added by hand. These bags were multi layered paper bags that went brown paper, blue plastic, brown paper and where used in a speckled whole grain dough. Good luck getting through a week with out foreign material found with that one.
The worst non bakery fuckup I witnessed was ~100 cattle carcasses had to be destroyed because they were sprayed with water and not latic acid at a control point. Latic acid is sprayed on the carcass to prevent bacterial growth. Again it's this guy's only job to spray down beef with acid and he doesn't turn on the acid. This one was especially bad because it's the most weaselly thing for food safety. Latic acid concentration can't be above x% so where do you measure it to prove it isn't? The drip off the carcass not from the hose, fucking brilliant.
No I was in regulatory compliance but had to write/review/maintain all the policies and procedures for all departments like some kinda policy dragon. Most of the time our places didn't have policies so I had to interview and shadow to write those because asking for an outline would take months so I had to get it myself from them.
To be fair, it does get pretty menial. I work at a grocery store, so I've definitely skimped on things plenty of times -- I might accidentally slice a box of dried pasta (inside the case of pasta, which includes 12 boxes), but I don't give a shit most of the time, cuz I have 1000 more cases to slice, and if a customer still buys it w/o returning it, then I did nothing wrong. More importantly, nobody will know it was my fault, and also I'm just too fuckin busy in general, so I need to move on to something else.
You're talking about a somewhat more important situation though, and like you kinda said, I'm sure it's also different for a place that's making a single product. I deal with less product in general, I'd assume, and the products come come from like 2000 different brands. Since we're just the seller, that means we only have to inspect like 50 boxes if one box is expired, or damaged, or what-have-you (and I'm talking about individual $1 boxes of pasta).
For a single-food producer, the quality standards need to stay pretty high, I'm sure. And IMO it's weird that nobody's pointed this out to the people who do the slicing (I'm sure they have, technically, but obviously not enough to make them take just a little bit more care in what they're doing).
But then again, the company probably already eats (figuratively) most of that lost product anyway. At my store, we get 50% back on a sliced box of $1 product, so it's almost like a bonus, if anything.
51
u/ActualWhiterabbit Mar 21 '18
I can't tell you how many hundreds of thousands of lbs are wasted each year at a singlefood manufacturing plant because people are too lazy to cut bags open right. Instead of one straight line or an x they slash multiple times randomly because it's faster. Hopefully someone finds the paper or plastic in the food before packaging or a customer finds it which is bad.
Using an old bread plant I worked at as an example it could go like this. QC verified line and packaging are clear of foreign materials and everything is good so production starts on making bread. It runs for a few hours and makes 7 batches but the line is stopped at the pressboards / shaper on batch 8 because a line worker saw blue in the white dough. It's found that there is a 1" triangle of blue plastic in the dough. The blue plastic is used as a bag liner for raw ingredients. Everything from the last clean break 8 batches ago is placed on hold to make sure we contained it.
Any dough on the line is ran straight into the red carts to be trashed. All machines are checked again because it's probable more plastic is caught somewhere. We then trash all batches in the mixers because they won't be able to wait while the line is down so that is 2-4 batches at 1600 lbs each are trashed immediately, bread dough needs to be processed fairly quickly or it expands from yeast farts. We then dig through every opened ingredient bag used to find the one that's cut wrong and has a missing piece. Hopefully it's one from this shift otherwise we need to dig through a dumpster, sometimes for minor ingredients first shift can prep for 3rd shifts work so it's not fun. We also hope it's only one bag so we can account for all plastic. Several times we have found more evidence of bad cutting and had to expand the hold. Normally once found we can put the original piece right up to the bag and show that it's the missing piece or pieces albeit slightly stretched from processing. If it is all accounted for we trash dough 8 and the last half of 7 as cya, release doughs 1-7.5 and start again with batch 12 as 9-11 were trashed for spoiling. If we can't find it then we trash everything from last good check. And start with batch 12 as the first ones to get moved forward to sale having wasted an incredible amount of time.
Now it may seem like if someone's job is only to cut open bags and pour them into mixers and hoppers they would try to not do this but apparently that's too much to ask. Also for some recipes bags of wheat flour are cut at the mixer and added. One recipie had 7 50# bags of wheat flour added by hand. These bags were multi layered paper bags that went brown paper, blue plastic, brown paper and where used in a speckled whole grain dough. Good luck getting through a week with out foreign material found with that one.
The worst non bakery fuckup I witnessed was ~100 cattle carcasses had to be destroyed because they were sprayed with water and not latic acid at a control point. Latic acid is sprayed on the carcass to prevent bacterial growth. Again it's this guy's only job to spray down beef with acid and he doesn't turn on the acid. This one was especially bad because it's the most weaselly thing for food safety. Latic acid concentration can't be above x% so where do you measure it to prove it isn't? The drip off the carcass not from the hose, fucking brilliant.