Correctly Preparing Your Facility for Color-Coding

Before starting to use color-coding in your food production setup, it is essential to address the following questions:

What are the potential hazards in my food production setup?

You must identify all potential food safety hazard risks (allergens, microorganisms, foreign bodies), in your production setup, based on the type of food you produce as well as your production processes, customer segment, legislation, and certification(s). If you have a HACCP plan, you will have identified these hazards and assessed the associated risk already.

Is there a risk that my product(s) may become contaminated by allergens?

If the answer is yes, the ideal color-coding solution is to allocate a specific color to the tools and equipment that come into contact with these allergens.

Is your food production setup divided into zones?

If your production facility is already divided into zones, you can base your color-coding on your existing zones, if it makes practical sense.

Give each zone its own color to make it easy to identify the equipment and tools that belong to each zone.

Zone division can also be applied at the production line level to limit the risk of cross-contamination between one line and another. This type of zone control involves allocating a designated color to equipment intended for use exclusively within a particular area and/or on a particular production line.