Dock equipment enhances safety, security and cold chain integrity

The Sartori Co. is a fourth-generation, family-owned and operated cheese manufacturing company located in Plymouth, Wis. When designing its new facility, the company selected an assortment of dock equipment to ensure compliance with the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA).

FSMA identifies docks as a high-risk zone for food defense and facility security. The design process for controlling the dock environment and cold chain began on the outside of the 100,000-square-foot building. Automatic vehicle restraints (Rite-Hite, ritehite.com) wrap around the trailer’s rear impact guard to increase safety, reduce contamination and prevent theft.

Once a trailer is secure at the loading dock, a vertical dock leveler helps maintain environmental control and cold chain integrity by allowing trailer doors to open inside the facility. The seal is broken inside the building by Sartori staff, as opposed to outside by the truck driver, increasing security and eliminating exposure to precipitation, wind or dust. The tight seal helps keep the dock at an ideal 34°F to 36°F.

Inside the building, high-speed doors further improve cold chain integrity by separating the de-boxing and de-palletizing areas from the processing room. The doors open and close at 65 inches per second to minimize temperature change and contamination between the two rooms.

“The vertical leveler/drive-through application is great for food processing facilities, as is the other dock equipment,” says Sara Adams, manager of manufacturing excellence at Sartori. “Regulatory requirements and our customers expect us to maintain the cold chain. With the system we now have in place, there are no temperature fluctuations inside the dock area regardless of the weather outside.”