ygiene and food safety have been dealt with from different fields of science such as
biology and health, and from different angles such as HACCP and GMP. Little
systematically ordered knowledge is available for the analysis of a layout, taking
hygienic factors into account. HACCP and GMP are perfectly usable for monitoring and
determining risks in a running operation. These methods are also good to show that hygiene
is dealt with in a proper way, but they do not translate risks into layout-specific requirements.
On the other hand, layout planning has been used for decades in production management and
one can find elaborate methods in the production management literature, but hygienic factors
have not been systematically dealt with here. This paper offers an approach that enables
hygienic layout design of a food-processing plant that is particularly useful in production
engineering and design for food processing companies that face a large number of product
changes.