5 Questions with Alison Smith, Meritech

Alison Smith, hygiene expert and Director of Corporate Success at Meritech, explains why hygiene is now a measure of corporate social responsibility and some easy steps you can take to build a long-lasting culture of hygiene excellence at your facility. 

1 Why is hygiene now a measure of corporate social responsibility?

Hygiene has always been a life or death situation for food processing and packaging companies. Good or bad hygiene can affect product quality, consumer safety and employee well-being. However, due to the pandemic, consumers are more aware of hygiene than ever before and are taking into account the hygiene and safety practices of an organization as a major factor in their purchasing decisions.

2 Can organizations afford to not address hygiene challenges right now?

Absolutely not—poor hygiene and inadequate hygiene SOPs are the one thing that will shut down a business immediately. The average cost of a recall is over $10 million, not including the irreversible damage to the company brand and loss in consumer confidence. This brand damage is even more prevalent now that consumers are aware of how important hygiene is for their own safety.

3 How would I improve hygiene at my facility for long-term success?

As tempting as it would be to just set up a hand sanitizer stand and say that you’ve improved hygiene at your facility, that’s simply not the case. Hygiene is a part of every facility process every day. It’s a foundation of your organizational processes and procedures and is the responsibility of each and every person at a facility to do their best to ensure hygiene for consumer safety.

4 What’s something easy I can do to begin improving hygiene at my facility?

Sometimes it’s difficult to know where the problems are when it comes to hygiene. Something that seems like it’s doing the job might actually have critical flaws that can directly impact consumer safety. We’ve developed a quick hygiene health quiz so you can easily see where you can start improving hygiene processes at your facility. Take it now at Meritech.com

5 I already know that I need to improve handwashing, what can I do?

The drawback of most handwashing processes is the variability of human behavior. Ensuring that everyone washes their hands adequately every time is difficult, but with CleanTech® Automated Handwashing Stations you can rest assured that every employee is removing more than 99.9% of dangerous pathogens from their hands every time. Now with CleanTech Plus you’ll be able to ensure this for a low monthly payment, learn more at Meritech.com/cleantech-plus.