In the meat-processing plants of Maple Leaf Foods, a company rocked by a deadly listeriosis outbreak in 2008, strict sanitary procedures are ever present. Just crossing the plant floor could take 15 minutes or more because workers and visitors are constantly required to remove protective coveralls and wash down as they traverse the facility.
For production supervisors, the rules meant lots of lost time – up to two hours a day – as they shuttled between the plant floor and their offices to manually enter time-sensitive operational data. All those productivity leaks disappeared last fall when the company gave supervisors iPads to scan and record data, such as equipment maintenance readings and inventory levels, directly into the system. The company’s food safety and quality assurance staff will soon be outfitted with similar devices to record inspection results.
Maple Leaf Foods has also deployed sensors that continuously measure plant humidity and temperature, then analyze those readings to alert personnel to food safety risks, such as inadequate ventilation or lengthy wait times for trucks carrying raw meat into the processing plants.
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