In a food and beverage facility, a single safety barrier has to do two jobs that pull against each other. It has to stop a two-tonne FLT, and it has to survive a caustic washdown every night without becoming an area where bacteria can sit. That tension is the reason a site assessment here looks almost nothing like a standard warehouse survey.
If you run safety or operations on a hygiene-critical site, you already know the usual barrier advice wasn't written for your floors, your wet zones, or your next audit. The controls that work fine in a dry distribution centre can fail an audit in a food factory.
So this article walks through exactly what I assess on a food and beverage site, in the order I assess it, before a single barrier is specified.
Contents
On most sites, a safety assessment asks one core question: where do people and vehicles come into conflict, and how do we separate them? That question still matters in food and beverage. But there's a second one that's also important: will this control compromise food safety?
Every physical control we consider has to pass both tests at once. A barrier, a gate, a floor marking, a projected line: each has to hold up against impact and survive daily cleaning, high-pressure hosing, temperature swings and chemical contact without harbouring contamination. A control that passes the first test and fails the second will be removed by the site's quality team within months, and you are back to an unprotected route.
This is why the general duty under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 and the sector-specific guidance in HSE's HSG252 Recipe for Safety have to be read together on a food site. You are engineering for people, product and process in the same breath.
Not in the warehouse. It starts at the hygiene barrier, with the site's own induction, changing protocol and zoning rules, because those rules dictate what we are allowed to install and where.
The first thing I map is the flow of product through the building: intake, storage, production, packing, despatch. Then I overlay the flow of people and FLTs on top of it. In a food and beverage plant these two flows cross far more often than in a dry warehouse, because raw materials, work in progress and finished goods are constantly moving between temperature-controlled zones.
I also note where high-care and low-care areas meet. The threshold between them is one of the most safety-critical and hygiene-critical points on the whole site, and it is usually where a standard barrier specification falls down. What protects a walkway well in a low-care goods-in area may be completely inappropriate a few metres away across a high-care line.
This is the part of the assessment that has no equivalent in a normal warehouse survey, and it shapes most of the decisions that follow.
The first thing I am watching for is contamination. Anywhere water or product can collect is somewhere bacteria can sit, so on a food site that risk has to be designed out, not cleaned around. That is where the barrier itself earns its place. Our polymer safety barriers are built for exactly these environments: smooth, wipe-clean surfaces, corrosion-free, with none of the crevices, bolt pockets or rust bleed that turn a fixing detail into a dirt trap. So the question on a hygiene-critical site is never whether a control can survive daily washdown. It is where and how it goes in.
That still leaves the floor itself. Slips are the defining injury risk of the sector. Slips and trips make up around 35% of major injuries across the food and drink industries, and roughly 90% of those slips happen on floors that are wet with water or contaminated with product, according to HSE's food and drink figures that we regularly cite. Under Regulation 12 of the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992, floors must be suitable and kept free from anything likely to cause a slip. So I assess floor condition, drainage falls and standing-water zones as safety infrastructure, not housekeeping.
That picture then drives placement. In a washdown area I map how the daily clean moves through the space: where water sits, how the floor drains, which zones stay wet longest and how closely they run to traffic routes. It is what tells me exactly where to position and fix protection so it works with the cleaning regime and the drainage, and so it lands where FLT routes and the busiest pedestrian areas overlap.
The legal duty is the same as any site: under Regulation 17 of the Workplace Regulations, traffic routes must let pedestrians and vehicles move safely, and HSG76 Warehousing and Storage sets the expectation for how that is achieved. What changes is the environment the segregation has to work in.
I assess the pinch points that are specific to food and beverage: chilled and frozen zones where visibility and reaction times drop, tight production aisles where FLTs and operators pass close to live lines, and intake and despatch bays where the tempo is highest. Cold stores get their own attention, because barrier behaviour and marking visibility both change at low temperature. (Our guide on pedestrian barriers for cold storage goes deeper on that specific problem.)
The principle I work to is the same segregation hierarchy of controls we apply on every site. The difference is that in food and beverage, the highest-protection option is not automatically the right one if it cannot meet the hygiene standard.
By this point the assessment has already defined what the barrier has to do, so selection is about matching a suitable product to the site rather than starting from a blank page.
A barrier on a hygiene-critical site has to meet two standards at once, and the hygiene one comes first. Hygienic design means a smooth, wipe-clean surface with no crevices, bolt pockets or rust bleed for water and product to collect in, so it can be cleaned to the standard the site's auditors expect. The second is impact performance to PAS 13:2017, so it does the safety job it is there for. Clarity's polymer safety barriers are built to both: corrosion-free, wipe-clean and rated for FLT impact, with no floor damage or rust bleed. That is why they suit these environments by design, where materials that corrode, flake or shed would not.
I won't cover the full selection criteria here, because we already have a detailed guide on how to choose safety barriers for a hygiene-critical environment. This assessment is the work that has to happen before that decision, so the barrier you choose fits the building it is going into.
You get a marked-up plan of your site showing where people, FLTs and product conflict, which controls each zone needs, and which options are ruled out on hygiene grounds before anyone quotes you. A specification that has already passed both tests, so you are not paying to install something your own hygiene team will pull out later.
For a whole facility, that is our Full Site Package: a site visit, high-risk zone mapping, and 2D and 3D drawings of the fix. If the problem is a single pinch point, like one crossing that keeps failing washdown, a lighter assessment covers just that, and food and beverage groups running several sites can standardise across all of them. Every tier is credited back against any installation you go on to order.
If you want that clarity before committing to anything, book a Full Site Package assessment for your facility. Not ready for a full visit? Our free two-minute factory safety quiz is a quick first read on where your site stands.
It is a structured walkthrough of a hygiene-critical site that maps where people, FLTs and product conflict, then identifies which safety controls each zone needs and which are ruled out on hygiene grounds, before any barrier is specified.
Every control has to pass two tests at once: impact protection and hygienic design. It also assesses wet and washdown zones, high-care and low-care thresholds, and temperature-controlled areas that a dry warehouse does not have.
Materials and fixings that perform well in a dry warehouse can corrode, trap contamination or fail a hygiene audit under daily washdown. In food and beverage, a control that cannot be cleaned to standard will not stay on site.
About the Author
Merryl Simpson is the Client & Project Manager at Clarity Safety. Merryl runs Clarity projects from first site visit to final handover.
Connect with Merryl on LinkedIn