Bakery saves 95% of labour time using CIP system for conveyor belts

Calise and Sons Bakery has been delivering high-quality baked goods to the northeast of the USA for over 100 years, with a commitment to safe practices and continually improving their standards and processes. Maintaining this commitment was becoming a time-consuming and laborious endeavour for the Calise sanitation team.

The challenge:

The company’s facility in Rhode Island has multiple conveyor belts for baking, cooling and glazing. Its streamlined conveyor belt system weaves throughout the facility including sections suspended from the ceiling to deliver goods into their multiple, nearly 6 m high, spiral coolers.

Its weekly cleaning of the belts required multiple employees from members of the sanitation team to mechanics as they needed to remove the various sections of its conveyor belts, clean them and then reinstall.

To clean the entirety of its conveyor belt system, divided into 18 sections, was taking around 2 hours per section for two to four employees per section — ie, 120 labour hours to clean its conveyor belts.

The solution:

Working with one of the experts from the Goodway team, the company found a suitable solution during an on-site demo. The decision was made to get a GVC-18000 dry steam cleaner and the PureBelt Modular belt cleaning system.

Using an automated clean-in-place solution that harnessed the cleaning power of dry steam would deliver the sanitation results needed, reduce wastewater and eliminate much of the labour hours previously required.

The result:

Previously, it used to take 120 hours of labour time to properly clean its entire conveyor belt system but now it takes around only 6 hours in labour time and around 20 hours of total clean time — equivalent to a 95% labour/time savings for cleaning its belts.

As a bonus the GVC-18000 dry-steam cleaner was implemented to clean its slicer and other hard-to-reach areas. What once took anywhere from one to three hours is now completed in just 30 minutes.