The importance of sanitary design

The brand-new Enjoy Life Foods bakery,  located in Jeffersonville, IN, is a sight to behold. After acquiring Enjoy Life in 2015, Mondelez International showed its commitment to growing the brand by investing in construction of the state-of-the-art bakery, thereby giving the allergen-free brand the resources and positioning it needs to significantly grow its global presence. (For complete details, see our 2017 “Bakery of the Year” cover story on free-from pioneer Enjoy Life Foods in this issue)

At the start of the construction project, the bakery was merely a shell, poised for shaping by key Enjoy Life operations leaders—some of whom were assigned to the company from parent Mondelez, seasoned industry veterans with many years of running food manufacturing facilities. Working with design-build partner Gray Construction, the team created a facility with high levels of sanitary design throughout. Key features include hygienic pressurization and multi-tiered GMP areas to prevent unintended introduction of allergens into the production area.

And then it came time to create the lines, outfitted with brand-new, gleaming stainless steel equipment engineered with the latest sanitary design features across the board. The bakery maintains a strict, exhaustive vetting system for working with supply-chain partners.

While sanitary design is a central aspect of today’s snack and bakery industry, examples of new, well-funded construction projects really give it a chance to shine.

Tight GMPS, sanitary design and associated sanitation standard operating procedures (SSOPs) are vital considerations for everyone across the industry today—nobody wants to make their customers sick—but they become the lynchpins of a company like Enjoy Life. For consumers loyal to Enjoy Life, they’re quite literally putting their lives into the bakery’s hands.

This is the overall direction of the industry as a whole. By examining the lengths a company like Enjoy Life goes to in order to maintain a safe, supremely hygienic environment, we get a glimpse of the future of the entire industry.

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Douglas J. Peckenpaugh is Group Publisher of Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery, Dairy Foods, The National Provisioner, and Packaging Strategies for BNP Media. He has nearly three decades of publishing experience following the food industry from farm to fork, covering agriculture, ingredient processing, retail grocery branding, foodservice menu development, and food product R&D and manufacturing. He serves in leadership roles at his local suburban Chicago food pantry and church. Doug studied Professional and Creative Writing at Purdue University.