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▶Article Food and beverage hygiene and CIP
Reducing Chemicals in CIP Without Compromising Hygiene Goals
Cleaning in place (CIP) recurs throughout production and affects food safety, plant availability, water demand and cost together. When a site wants to use less chemistry, water or time, the change therefore has to be judged on more than the invoice. A shorter cycle or a lower dose counts as a success only when the changed recipe is shown to work reproducibly under real operating conditions.
Start by writing down the cleaning result your site needs: which soils, which surfaces and which release criteria matter.
This article looks at how dose, contact time and verification should be decided together rather than one at a time. The reasoning follows our white paper on optimising CIP processes, which treats the hygienic result as the fixed starting point and every resource as a variable to be tested against it. It does not give a general saving rate. Any reduction depends on product family, soil, plant geometry and the hygiene target, and none of these are known here.
Why reducing one chemical rarely solves the problem
A lower dose on its own does not show that cleaning still works. Cutting contact time while ignoring concentration, temperature or flow may weaken cleaning performance, because time, temperature, chemistry and mechanical action work together. A figure on the chemical invoice shows only one side of that change.
The same logic applies in the other direction. Sound hydraulics might make it possible to trim chemical or time allowances, though that is acceptable only under controlled conditions and when supported by evidence. A reduction whose effectiveness is merely assumed is not a result.
The largest cost of a CIP cycle may not be on the chemical invoice. Water, wastewater, energy, cleaning agents, labour, product loss and production downtime all belong to the cost of a cycle. For that reason, the cost question has to be framed around the whole cycle and the hygienic outcome it delivers.
The four factors act as one system
The white paper names four decision factors: time, temperature, chemistry, and flow and wetting. It treats soil as a fifth context, because soil type, amount and degree of drying determine how much process energy a cycle needs. In a closed system, mechanical action mainly means adequate flow, wetting and turbulence.
Which steps a cycle needs depends on product, soil, material, plant geometry and hygiene goal. Protein, fat, sugar, mineral deposits and biofilm respond differently. Standard recipes can look robust while still containing extra rinses or contact times whose benefit has never been tested with data, and such margins should be investigated under control rather than removed wholesale.
Because the factors interact, a change must be judged against the cycle as a whole. A shift in one factor can change what the others must deliver to reach the same result. This is why optimisation cannot be run as a series of isolated adjustments, each approved on its own.
Changing one factor inside a tested range
Work begins by establishing a precisely specified cleaning outcome, and acceptance criteria are fixed before any trial is started. The aim is to achieve that result with the necessary use of time, temperature, chemistry and mechanical action, not with the maximum available at every step. Without a defined result, a shorter cycle has no reference point against which to succeed or fail.
Adjustments to parameters ought to be made in small steps, directed by a hypothesis and kept inside a demonstrated operating range. A factor is reduced only within a tested range and only against an agreed result. Where another factor needs a deliberate adjustment to keep the outcome stable, that adjustment should be recorded as part of the same trial.
These principles do not tell you which dose or time is sufficient for your soils and surfaces. Those values come from your own trials, and a trial result applies only to the product family, load and plant conditions it covered. Product families and levels of soiling may need their own validated recipe windows.
Keeping validation, monitoring and verification apart
Validation, routine monitoring and verification are three different evidence tasks that complement one another. They are not interchangeable. A good result under ideal conditions does not demonstrate robust cleaning.
In practice, these tasks answer different questions. Validation asks whether the defined process can achieve the hygiene goal. Routine monitoring asks whether each cycle stayed within the approved window. Verification checks over time, through trends, checks, audits and samples, that the system continues to work. Each question needs its own record.
The white paper asks for acceptance criteria to be set, process data to be retained and the hygienic result to be checked before release. An auditable record connects recipe version, plant state, batch, process curve, deviation and release decision. Isolated tables without that context are not enough.
Making resource use visible in every step
According to the white paper, the volume, duration, temperature, concentration, energy and lost production time for each CIP step should all be transparent. Without that record, a reduction cannot be compared against the documented reference cycle. A step by step balance often reveals waiting time, unclear rinse endpoints or media loss straight away.
What is being optimised is not a single piece of equipment. It is the demonstrable link between generation, dosing, process control, return flow and release. Every CIP step should have a purpose, a measurable endpoint and a verifiable result.
What this means for your site
Start by writing down the cleaning result your site needs: which soils, which surfaces and which release criteria matter. Then record time, temperature, concentration, volume, energy and lost production time for each CIP step over a representative period. That baseline is the reference against which any reduction should be judged.
Do not change the production standard until the objective, the trial, the acceptance criteria and the responsibilities are defined. Then change a limited parameter range, run the trial against the acceptance criteria and stop rules set beforehand, and keep validation, routine monitoring and verification as separate records. Validation takes place before release or after a material change. State in advance when a cycle may be repeated, when production must be blocked and when cause analysis or revalidation is required.
A change of cleaning chemistry follows the same logic. It needs a trial, agreed acceptance criteria and retained process data before the new recipe is released. This article does not establish that any particular chemistry meets a given hygiene requirement at your site.
Have a water related question? Use Hydreatio Smart Match to find the assessment most relevant to your operation. The result provides directional guidance and does not replace laboratory testing, site inspection or expert assessment.
SourcesHydreatio technical report "Optimising CIP Processes". Technical documentation from Voigtländer.