4 Solutions to minimise the cross contamination risk for factory pens

Mobile equipment can pose a potential foreign body risk to your processes and products. Contamination may then lead to loss of product, production time or even costly recalls. Most food facilities now take active measures to reduce these risks.

Here are 4 practical solutions to reducing this risk to an acceptable level on your site.

1. Colour coded

It’s important you know which pens are used where - it could pose a big risk if a low care pen ended up in high care. One way of managing this is to give different areas colour coded pens. The Retreeva Global pens come in 4 different colours (blue, red, green and yellow) so they can be easily used for visual segregation (e.g. blue for low care, red for high risk).

2. Shatterproof

Working in production it is easy to break a traditional pen, which will increase the cross contamination risk. Retreeva Global pens are designed to prevent damage occurring in the first place. Unlike some detectable pens on the market, which shatter into shards on impact, the Retreeva Global pen body is robust and will sustain impact, initially bending and yielding to the impact. If the worst happens and the pen can no longer sustain the impact. It will only break into larger pieces and not fragment into shards. This increases the likelihood of detection and decreasing the risk of undetected contamination.

3. Detectable

Once a pen or piece of the pen has managed to enter the production line it is extremely important that you’re able to locate it quickly. Retreeva Global Pens are made from a metal impregnated polypropylene. This allows it to be detected through metal and X-rays detectors. Detectability of pens depends on 3 factors:

Detection device sensitivity, setting and aperture can give extremely different results in the contaminant sample size that can be detected successfully.
The contaminant which can be too small to be detected successfully.
If using metal detection, orientation can seriously impact detectability for example shards presented point first into the detector, are almost impossible to detect.

It is always good practice to validate each of your detecting devices with differing sample contaminant sizes, so that your site can determine whether the 'acceptable' limit for your site is achievable.

As Retreeva Global pens do not shatter detectability is noticeably better than other detectable pens available, therefore posing a lower risk. In addition, Retreeva Global pens do not contain a spring, which again can be extremely hard for detection to identify.

4. Accountability

How does your site ensure no pens are lost or misplaced without their knowledge? Does your site issue and recall all pens to staff on a regular basis? Or are you purely dependent on staff reporting loss or damage?

To reduce further risk of contamination from pens, it is therefore as important to ensure you have a robust accountability system for your pens. Best practice is to issue pens to staff on a daily basis, signing them back in at the end of shift. This way you will quickly know if a pen has been lost, misplaced or damaged, so corrective action can be taken to minimise the risk of cross contamination or a potential recall scenario. This will also demonstrate to your customers and auditors that you take this risk seriously.

With Retreeva Global pens, you have the additional option of using Klipspringer's IndeliMark to permanently mark each of your pens with a unique serial number or any other bespoke ID your site might require. This makes detectable pen accountability on Indelimark fool proof and even easier to manage.

For more information contact Klipspringer on 01473 461800 or email sales@klipspringer.com.