National Safety Month: Stampede Sunland Park, NM Clean Room Complete

Safety within all aspects of the business is a top priority for Stampede.  For their customers, employees, and products some form of safety measure and compliance is set in place.  At Stampede’s newest facility in Sunland Park, NM, the 3^rd phase of the renovation project was to implement a clean room.  With the clean room now open, this provides further growth capabilities for Stampede, but also new opportunities for menu innovation for their customers.  Below are some Q&A’s on this newly added processing area, provided by Stampede’s Quality Assurance team.What are the benefits of a clean room?

• • The clean room in our Sunland Park food processing facility provides additional safeguards and controls that are necessary for a high-risk and high-care processing areas which we will use to process post-lethality products. The purpose of the clean room is to provide a much cleaner environment, with ideal temperature control, HEPA filter air flow, separate and isolated distribution and control of clothing/ supplies to team members to reduce the chance for product contamination from cross contamination.  This type of environment supports provides an increased food safety and product quality processing area.

Why is a clean room used?  

• • Food manufacturers use a clean room because they are concerned with the spread of bacteria, yeasts and molds which can contaminate post-lethality products when further handling and processing. The idea of a clean room is to provide a clean and safe processing environment which is free of microbial contaminants which could compromise the products.

What a clean room is used for?

• • Ready-to-eat proteins have expanded over the years and thus the need to design a processing area where the environment aids in preventing microbial contaminants such as Listeria monocytogenes from being present in the product during processing.

What specifics are being implemented in the clean room?

• • A clean room is used in a high-risk product area and it is constructed by the facility with higher microbiological safeguards in place, such as team members wearing specific dedicated protective clothing and captive footwear, along with a required personal intervention step to prevent the introduction of pathogens from the outside environment.

What makes a clean room different from other processing areas?

• • A clean room is designed to provide a much high controlled/ clean environment to reduce the level of pollutants such as dust, airborne microbes, aerosols, and chemicals that may be present in a typical processing area.  It creates an almost sterile environment in which products can be processed post-lethality under a high standard of food safety with-in a facility.