Supermarket Perimeter - August 2019 - 76

OPERATIONS

by Bob Sims

OPERATORS OF PROCESSING
FACILITIES might encounter
any number of reasons for not
tackling the sanitation shift
in-house. Whether the reasons
stem from environmental issues,
microbiological, staffing, leadership or otherwise, the beneﬁts of
outsourcing sanitation services
are many.
Kieler, Wisconsin-based
Packers Sanitation Services Inc.
(PSSI) provides contract sanitation services to processing plants
facing issues which keep them
from using in-house staff or hiring for sanitation purposes, and
a recent rebranding campaign
suggests a trend in the industry

that has positioned PSSI as a
multi-dimensional food safety
partner rather than just a sanitation contractor.
PSSI employs many different
teams to handle and monitor
any given situation. These teams
transcend simple sanitation
crews tasked to clean facilities.
Regarding the brand relaunch,
Timm Miller, director of corporate accounts, says, "Along with
that, we've bolstered our teams.
So, we have a dedicated food
safety team with microbiologists.
A dedicated safety team that
believes in our company culture
of safety not being a trade secret."
PSSI conducts webinars and

Every production facility carries its own set of sanitation challenges.
76 - AUGUST 2019

www.supermarketperimeter.com

sanitation cycle or the next day
or night. It's a unique tool to the
industry."
PSSI's Field Audit Support Team
(FAST) is another value-added
service outside of the company's
deployment of sanitation crews.
The FAST team focuses on regulatory issues, which sometimes
change daily and make it difficult
for processors to stay up to date
on. The FAST team will micro
sample and analyze around what
the nature of sanitation is at any
given facility and guide the sanitation crews for that facility.
"And the FAST team is deployed
to customer locations to help
provide mitigation strategies if a
problem does occur," Miller says.

Customization
Every processing facility will
differ from another in some way.
Even facilities owned by the same
company, processing the same
products from the same species
using the same equipment will

PHOTOS: PSSI

OUTSOURCING
SANITIZATION

publishes thought pieces concerning safety in the workplace
intended to beneﬁt the industry
as a whole, not just the company
and its subsidiaries.
"We also have an open safety
summit every year where we
bring in industry experts from
outside PSSI as well as internal
people and provide a very robust
program around building safety
programs at a facility," Miller says.
Most recently, PSSI launched
Realtime Performance Metrics
(RPM). The tablet-based program
provides real-time data on key
metrics related to sanitation.
"Maybe you lose water pressure during the course of the
evening," Miller says. "We're able
to track that and send updates
to the facility via tablets and say,
'we're having water pressure
issues.' We're able to correlate all
these metrics at the end of the
shift back to the problem and
suggest strategies to alleviate
those problems on the next
http://www.supermarketperimeter.com
Supermarket Perimeter - August 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Supermarket Perimeter - August 2019
