Plant sanitation is one of the easier services to sell and one of the harder ones to verify. The work is invisible when it is done well and invisible when it is done badly, right up until a swab result or an audit finding makes it visible.
Here is what to check before that happens.
1. What do they arrive with?
This is the fastest test there is. A contractor equipped for industrial sanitation shows up with industrial sprayers, not a bottle sprayer. The scale of the equipment tells you whether they have done work of this size before, and whether the coverage they are promising is physically achievable in the time quoted.
Ask what equipment will be on site. If the answer is vague, that is the answer.
2. Do they clean before they sanitize?
If soil or dust is present on a surface, the sanitation chemical cannot reach the area covered by that debris, and that area is not sanitized. A contractor who quotes sanitizing without cleaning is quoting a result they cannot deliver.
The correct sequence is to remove soil, dust particles, grease and debris from all surfaces and objects first, then sanitize. Any proposal should reflect that.
3. What chemicals, and are they registered?
Ask for EPA-registered cleaning and sanitizing chemicals, and ask how they are chosen. Products should be selected for the surface and the facility rather than applied uniformly across a building, and in a food environment the choice is also an audit question.
4. What are they trained and certified against?
Compliance with OSHA and the EPA, adherence to CDC guidelines and IICRC certification are the baseline. In a food plant, ask specifically which GFSI-recognized programs their technicians train through, and how recently.
The reason this matters to you rather than to them: the contractor cleaning your facility is part of what an auditor assesses.
5. Where has their experience come from?
Food plants have been sanitizing for a very long time, which makes food plant experience the most transferable there is. Biohazard cleanup experience is also relevant, because it brings containment discipline that general cleaning work does not.
What you are looking for is thousands of hours of on-the-job experience rather than a service line added recently to catch demand.
6. What do you get afterwards?
Documentation of what was cleaned and sanitized, when, with what, and by whom. This is what turns the work into evidence you can use.
The underlying question
All six of these are really one question: is sanitation a core capability for this contractor, or a service they offer? The answers will make it obvious.
Read about our plant sanitization services and GFSI training, or ask us these questions.
