Why clean your food processing plant "In Place"?
To be perfectly blunt about it – how else are you going to clean the inside of your food or drink process plant? With a long bottle brush and a hose pipe?
All joking aside, apart from the physical difficulties of accessing the inside of process tanks and vessels to manually clean the surfaces, how do you clean the inside of the twenty-metre long section of fixed pipe between two tanks, or a tank and a filler? You Clean your plant In Place (CIP).
Cleaning In Place
It does what it says on the tin – CIP is a system for cleaning all the internal contact surfaces of your food and drink production plant In Place. This is opposed to cleaning Out of Place which is what we do in the kitchen when we’re washing up. We take the used cooking equipment and we put it in a sink of hot, soapy water, then scrub it, then rinse it. Whilst this system is eminently satisfactory for a few pots and pans, it is usually impractical to take commercial food and drink processing equipment and put it in a very large sink! Instead, we effectively take the sink, the water, the suds and the scrubbing to the process. Cleaning In Place usually consists of the same basic steps as your washing up at home;
Rinse
The insides of the food processing equipment are given a rinse of water – cold or hot – to get rid of the “gross debris”. This first rinse is generally put straight down the drain.
Scrub
The main cleaning phase – the bit that does the work – is also termed the “detergent step”. The insides of the equipment are washed with a moving stream of hot detergent solution. This is usually recirculated around the system at speed to give a “scrubbing” effect on the surfaces. After the detergent step, most of the detergent solution is still in useable condition, so it’s often recovered for future use.
Rinse
The final step is to rinse off any traces of detergent with a stream of fresh water. Now some people omit this step when they’re doing their dishes, but I don’t hold with that. Detergent cannot be good for you! In the food and drink processing industries, detergent is definitely not good for customers so the final rinsing step is a vital ingredient in Cleaning In Place.
