Inherently Safer Recipes for Process Safety and Operability

This presentation would discuss how decisions made during recipe formulation can cause process safety and operability issues during commercial production. The presenter has 15+ years experience as a process engineer serving multiple food production clients. In that time, several instances have been encountered where ingredient choices have made jobs of plant engineers, maintenance and operators more challenging or sometimes inherently less safe. The goal of the presentation is to compare the principles of inherently safer design to food product development.

Actual examples from industry will be given with care to not call out food production companies' identities or to identities of well known brand name products. The examples are likely to include:

• Pressure cooking different grains presents different hazards, such as likelihood of plugging that can lead to high pressure incidents that could injure operators.
• Concentrated flavorings may be flammability or personnel inhalation hazards.
• Common inclusions or dyes in popular products often require a completely different design for fines collection and equipment cleanability than other inclusions or dyes.
• Certain vegetable oils or fats present gelling or plugging concerns that may result in equipment or piping overpressure and potential personnel injury.
• The design basis for major unit operations such as toasters and impingement ovens may not allow for great flexibility in types of products. Design values for airflow or dew point may be very specific to a recipe and not easily or safely applied to a new recipe that is desired to be produced on that equipment.

Detailed explanations of engineered solutions developed to address these issues will not be presented, but basic protocols and generic solutions will be discusses.