Why hygiene standards fail: The equipment and culture gap
If everyone knows the hygiene rules, why do sanitation failures keep happening? The answer isn’t training.
Every chocolate and bar manufacturing facility has hygiene standards. Most have comprehensive sanitation protocols and clear accountability. Yet sanitation failures persist, from minor swab failures to major recalls.
If the standards exist and everyone knows them, where does execution break down?
We spoke with two industry veterans at PTL who've spent decades observing this gap from different vantage points. Mike Nevines, Global Technical Officer, has 25 years at PTL, overseeing hundreds of equipment installations and plant visits for all major chocolate and bar manufacturers. Dion Metcalfe, Global Operations Officer, built five greenfield sites for Hershey and Kellogg and led operations across three continents. Both diagnose the gap between standards and execution—but they focus on different factors.
Mike's lens is engineering: equipment design either enables or prevents proper sanitation, regardless of worker motivation. Dion's lens is organizational: culture determines whether workers execute standards consistently, regardless of equipment quality.
Both perspectives describe different aspects of the same challenge, and facilities need both to succeed. This piece explores where engineering capability and organizational culture intersect, and why that intersection matters more than either factor alone.
The engineering lens: When design determines compliance
After 25 years in the industry, Mike Nevines has observed a consistent pattern: even motivated sanitation crews struggle when equipment isn't designed for cleanability.
"If you've got to get in the machine with little tools to dig all the product out and clean it, they're not going to put the same effort in," Mike explains. "If it's just a matter of spraying with hot water and flushing it all out, even the lazy person can do it."
This thinking is foundational to PTL's existence. In 1982, Jim Halliday became chief engineer at VanCamp chocolate in New Zealand, where he maintained manufacturing equipment. He encountered what would become his life's work to solve: equipment that simply couldn't be cleaned.
"A lot of equipment couldn't be cleaned. It was horrible," Jim recalled. "When you did take it to pieces, it would take as long as two or three days and would often be full of bugs.”
Disassembly took days, so it rarely happened. But this was accepted practice. "The attitude was, 'If it ain't broke, just leave it full of chocolate. As long as you don't wash it, it'll be fine,'" Jim observed.
When Cadbury bought Red Tulip in 1989, Jim started PTL to solve these problems. He asked Mike Nevines to join him, and Mike has been leading PTL’s engineering department guided by these principles ever since.
The competitive reality
Mike is diplomatic when discussing other manufacturers, but the observation is unavoidable: equipment from well-known European suppliers often makes hygiene an afterthought instead of a design principle.
On a recent plant visit, he encountered equipment from a major industry supplier that was only 13 years old. "The design was shocking for sanitary purposes," he notes. Not because it was outdated, but because even current models from that manufacturer haven't evolved to address modern sanitation requirements.
Why does this persist? Because procurement decisions often prioritize supplier familiarity over equipment performance. This dynamic has allowed equipment design to stagnate. Machines optimized for an era of long production runs and infrequent changeovers continue shipping to plants that now need to clean daily for allergen management.
Putting principles into practice
When equipment actively resists proper cleaning, no amount of training can consistently overcome that barrier. That's why PTL's design approach focuses on eliminating resistance at the source through three practical principles:
1. Make cleaning so simple that people actually do it
Even with the best intentions, people put off difficult jobs. When facing time pressures, they cut corners. The design philosophy: remove that temptation entirely. Make equipment so simple that cleaning becomes the path of least resistance.
2. Make it easy for a non-engineer
Most operators don't have formal engineering training. Trying to disassemble or adjust equipment without proper knowledge can destroy belts and cause mechanical damage. The solution: design equipment that novices can operate and maintain safely without specialized expertise.
3. Tool-less design, removable components
The design process centers on imagining what happens on the factory floor and how machine design changes behavior. Every component prompts questions: How will operators access this? How will they clean it? And if they can't, what will they do instead?
Mike's experience suggests that equipment design determines cleaning outcomes. Night shift crews under time pressure will find the path of least resistance. If the equipment makes corner-cutting easier than thorough cleaning, corner-cutting is what you'll get.
But there’s another side to the story, says Dion Metcalfe.
The culture lens: When hygiene depends on belief
Dion Metcalfe brings a different set of observations from his years building and running facilities for major manufacturers across three continents.
"All companies have the right standards," he notes. "It's just whether their operation is executed to the standards."
He's seen this pattern repeatedly: identical equipment specifications, identical hygiene protocols, dramatically different results. The variable isn't the machinery or the documented procedures. It's how the organization operates day-to-day.
What varies across facilities and cultures
Dion's global experience revealed something that doesn't often make it into equipment specifications or standard operating procedures: cultural context profoundly shapes execution.
In Asian facilities he's worked with, hygiene compliance tends to be consistently high. The management structure is more hierarchical. Instructions are followed systematically. Authority is respected.
"Asian plants tend to be very good at food safety," Dion observes. "And that's because it's more of a top-down approach when it comes to leadership."
But that approach doesn't translate to American or European facilities, where the cultural dynamic between operators and leadership is different. Dion describes visiting a facility in Australia where the leadership team had to request permission from operators before entering the production area. Similar dynamics exist in many US facilities, particularly unionized plants. The power structure is different.
This isn't a critique—it's an observation about operational reality. The question: if top-down management isn't the right tool to enforce hygiene standards, what works?
The bottom-up alternative
"You've absolutely got to start from the bottom up," Dion explains. But not through training programs or bonuses. It's about genuine operational partnership with people doing the work.
The challenge is this: sanitation workers are typically the lowest-paid employees in the plant. They often work night shifts with minimal direct supervision. Turnover is high, particularly in competitive labor markets. Their work is physically demanding, repetitive, and rarely recognized unless something goes wrong.
Why should they care deeply about executing procedures they didn't help design and can't influence?
The solution lies in creating genuine investment. "If they're telling you something and you can change that, you fundamentally make them a believer," Dion explains. "You make them a believer of the company and make them a believer in the process."
Putting culture change into practice
When a sanitation worker reports that a particular component is consistently difficult to clean properly, typical responses range from "follow the procedure" to "we’ll add it to the training."
Dion's approach is different: investigate whether the component design or the cleaning procedure can be modified. If the worker's observation is valid, implement the change. Then explicitly acknowledge that their input drove the improvement.
The impact isn't just on that one worker. It signals to the entire team that operational feedback matters, that management listens, and that their expertise is valued. This creates a reinforcing cycle. Workers who see their feedback implemented offer more feedback. That additional feedback often reveals efficiency improvements management wouldn't discover independently. Those improvements get implemented. Recognition follows. The culture shifts incrementally.
"Recognition is very, very powerful," Dion notes, "and normally money follows. But anyone who comes into work and goes, 'I want a pay raise because of that,' they're normally the last person to get a pay raise. It's the person who's doing meaningful work that you want to reward."
Dion doesn't avoid the difficult reality: sometimes culture can't be shifted without changing people. "If you don't change the culture, you've got to change the personnel."
Where engineering and culture intersect
Mike and Dion describe different aspects of the same challenge. Poor equipment design makes cleaning a chore that gets deprioritized. A top-down plant culture makes sanitation crews indifferent. Most facilities face some degree of both. When combined, they eat hygiene standards for breakfast.
The most accessible intervention point depends on where you are in capital and operational cycles.
If you're in a capital planning cycle, equipment selection should incorporate modern hygienic design principles from the beginning. Whether you're looking at PTL's approach or alternative suppliers, the core principles remain consistent.
This is your opportunity to eliminate engineering barriers that will otherwise persist for the equipment's entire operational life, potentially decades. The incremental cost of hygienic design is typically modest compared to the total capital investment, but the operational impact compounds over years of daily use.
If you're working with installed equipment, culture becomes the more accessible lever. Dion's bottom-up approach, systematically capturing and acting on floor-level feedback, can be implemented without capital approval or vendor selection processes. It requires management commitment and sustained attention, but not budget.
Ideally, both happen. Equipment embodying PTL’s hygienic design principles, combined with building genuine operational partnership. Find your gap. Address it systematically. Because the cost of ignoring it—measured in recalls, regulatory action, lost production time, and reputation damage—is only going to increase.
The question isn't whether to address hygiene execution gaps. The question is whether you'll do it proactively or in response to your next failure.