Avoiding Cross Contamination

Cross contamination is one of the worst things that can happen in the food industry, though it can affect other industries as well and should be a concern for anyone in the logistics industry.

Cross contamination is goods interacting with other goods, whether it be a spill, leak or odour. The classic (and potentially deadly) example of this is raw meat coming into contact with cooked meat. These two should never be coming into contact with each other as it could potentially kill someone.

Other examples are chemicals and cleaning fluids etc that could potentially poison food, or strong pungent odours penetrating food. Food that is stored at different temperatures also should not be mixed up.

It doesn’t even have to be food that is affected. Valuable clothes or fabrics that are stored near chemicals could become contaminated. You could have a variety of chemicals in the same warehouse that should not mix.

One of the best and simplest ways of reducing cross contamination is using tinted pallet covers to flag the contents of pallets. Bright bold colours as a warning sign are a tried and tested method. Some might even call them ‘idiot proof’.

Thermal covers can also be used to prevent different temperature goods coming into contact with each other.