Working in a bakery is a hard job, and by hard, it is labor-intense. Heavy bags of ingredients need to be lifted and moved. Repetitive motion tasks wear down the body. And the introduction of automation, while alleviating some of these tasks, also introduced a whole new world of risks to worker safety.

“We use a lot of manual labor, so we’re constantly dealing with carpal tunnel, strained backs,” said David Hipenbecker, senior director of engineering, Hostess Brands, Kansas City, and committee member, Z50 Safety & Sanitation Committee. “Bakers have faced the whole ergonomics issue for years. We want to eliminate repetitive motion as much as we can.”

Protecting the workforce from potential equipment and environment risks is in the best interest of not just individual bakeries but also the industry at large.

“We all have a responsibility to ensure the safety of our associates and our products,” said Rowdy Brixey, president, Brixey Engineering, Safety & Training, and member, Z50 Safety & Sanitation Committee. “No one benefits from any of us having a food safety event. That’s why it’s so important that all the baking companies and equipment manufacturers participate in ensuring that we have a relevant standard and also a reference in how we install, build and maintain our processing equipment because everyone loses if there’s a problem.”

In 1943, the American Society of Bakery Engineers (A.S.B.) held a general conference that led to the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) establishing the Z50 Committee. With the A.S.B. as secretariat, it developed and approved a standard of safety in 1947. That standard has been revised and replaced multiple times throughout its history to keep up with the needs of a changing industry. Today, the industry follows two ANSI standards, the Z50.1 Safety Standards and the Z50.2 Sanitation Standards.

“It is intended to provide guidance in safe design for the equipment manufacturer and guidance for the baker to help ensure they maintain their equipment safely and to provide operational instruction to the employee,” explained Jon Anderson, JRA Occupational Safety Consulting. Mr. Anderson serves alongside with Mr. Hipenbecker and Mr. Brixey on the Z50 Safety & Sanitation Committee.

This year, the Z50.1 Safety Standards are up for review again by the committee, a review that happens every five years to ensure the document is relevant to the industry. The aim is to give the baking industry the most useful reference guide possible to keep workers and food safe.

Evolving safety needs

From manual production with bakers tending to every step of the process to fully automated production lines running with minimal human interaction, the baking industry and its operations have changed dramatically. With each technological innovation has come the question, “How does this impact worker and food safety?” The baking industry has adapted to these changes well to create a generally safe environment for its employees.

“Bakeries have done an exceptional job of making sure their plants are safe,” said Phil Domenicucci, baking systems manager, AMF Bakery Systems, and vice-chairman, Z50 Safety & Sanitation Committee. “The plants have done such a good job of creating safety nets in their systems: the lockout/tagouts and other requirements requiring safety shoes, hard hats, hearing protection, eye protection and safety meetings. Everyone is looking out for safety. If you walked into a plant 25 years ago, you wouldn’t see any of that.”

Concerns about safety and automation have led not only to changes in worker protection standards but also to new information of the dangers of hard labor and repetitive motion. Where 100-lb bags of flour were once the norm, bakeries now often opt for 50-lb bags. Not only that, operators can get help from equipment to lift and move these bags to take the strain off human backs.

“We’re trying to figure out better ergonomic work stations, but we’re also trying to give tools and aids and even provide automation where we can eliminate those repetitive motions,” Mr. Hipenbecker said. “People are paying a lot more attention to conveyor height and ergonomic design so people aren’t leaning and reaching as far as they were in the past.”

Today, plants are even going further than making the production line more ergonomically friendly and employing safety managers, even nurses. These positions can drive risk assessments on new equipment and plant layouts as well as set up wellness and safety programs to encourage good habits for plant operators.

Standard evolution

 As the industry’s technology and priorities evolve, so must the safety standards that guide them.

“(The standard) is a living document that will always remain current by understanding the forces around us and the elements that are changing from a regulatory standpoint as well as new technology, new best practices or new devices to reduce the risk effectively,” Mr. Brixey said.

The committee puts the standard through a rigorous review process to ensure that it is as up to date and relevant as possible.

“(The standard) changes with the necessity of the requirements of the industry,” Mr. Domenicucci pointed out. “Twenty years ago, there were no references in here for robotics because there weren’t any. Today, we have a reference for robotic safety. On an earlier revision, we removed the requirements for safety for bolting reels. We did that because we couldn’t find anyone alive who knew what a bolting reel was.”

This year, committee members hope to make the standard more user-friendly and accommodate the advantages online resources offer. Z50.1 currently provides equipment manufactures a standard to design equipment to make it safe to operate. It also offers some guidance and a reference to bakers about how to operate this equipment safely, but Mr. Anderson believes there is room for improvement.

“One of the things the committee is going to be working on is to provide relevant and improved guidance to the baker, the end user of the equipment,” he said. “We need to make certain that as a committee, we are clear about the direction we want to take the standard; are we going to focus more on the safe design of the equipment, or are we going to focus on the safe operating practices, or both? I think the current Z50.1 standard has some opportunities to improve that end-user guidance.”

A main priority involves making the standard easier to use. While equipment manufacturers use the document as a design guide, the standard serves more as a reference to bakers, not something they check every day. Mr. Brixey, who as recently as June was the director of engineering and maintenance optimization for Bimbo Bakeries USA, Horsham, Pa., explained that Z50 has made safety and sanitation more standard with equipment design.

“The fact is you don’t necessarily have to refer to the standard on a daily basis because the manufacturers of our equipment, the way we’ve installed our equipment and the way we maintain and sanitize the equipment have all benefitted from the standard as it’s matured over the many years it’s existed,” he said. “It’s almost something you take for granted because of the way our industry has evolved.”

Mr. Hipenbecker believes the revised standard could be easier to navigate.

“People need to understand that not every section applies to every piece of equipment,” he said. “It needs to be organized in a way so that people can find what they need to know about a certain piece of equipment easily and quickly.”

Mr. Domenicucci suggested that many of the revisions will be smaller this time around but can help streamline the standard and make it more useful to bakers. For example, ensuring that equipment suppliers supply operating instructions to operators, maintenance and sanitation personnel. This could also be updated to include the industry’s move toward on-line manuals and training documents

Both worker and food safety have been at the forefront of the industry’s mindset for a while with the debate and rollout of the Food Safety Modernization Act. There are many standards floating around from different organizations. While the Z50 Safety & Sanitation Standards are the only ones that address bakery equipment and production specifically, there are others that apply to the industry, such as building codes, explosion-proof guidelines, electrical code standards and others. While the Z50 document should reference those standards, it doesn’t need to replace them.

“We need to make sure that this standard isn’t contradicting others,” Mr. Hipenbecker said. “We shouldn’t try to rewrite them.”

Whatever revisions the committee makes to the Z50.1 standard will continue to protect the safety of those operating bakery equipment.

“The standard is a guiding principle,” Mr. Brixey said. “It continues to evolve, and our equipment and our industry at large has benefitted. It is the backbone that has kept our processing lines and equipment food safe and people safe.”