Cleanliness

Looking back on my childhood, sometimes I think it is a wonder some of us survived.  My mother had 5 children and worked full time as a nurse.  Understandably, after a hard day at the hospital, she often tended to be a bit lax on keeping constant tabs on all 5 of us.  I can hear her now shouting out into the back yard or into the basement where we were horsing around: “What are you kids doing?” “Nothing!”  “What are you doing it with?” “The hammer!”  “Well, OK then”.

My grandmother, on the other hand, had a more militaristic approach.  Sometimes she was in charge when the parents had to go somewhere or work late.  She had to know our exact whereabouts at all times, who we were with, were these people on the “approved” list, and when we would be home.  For crying out loud, she made me limit my bike riding to the 50 feet of our driveway when normally I would go across town (with no helmet of course, since they had not been invented yet).  She was a stickler for making us wash our hands often.   She would say “Cleanliness is next to Godliness”.  When we retorted with “That’s just a metaphor - it really means cleanliness of soul.  They did not have soap and much water in the desert in Bible times”, we were summarily whapped with her old fly swatter until we went to the bathroom and washed up.  She would then inspect and make us wash again if we did not pass muster: “Cleanliness is next to Godliness”.  We would object and say they were clean enough.  “Cleanliness is next to Godliness - I decide what is clean enough”

Thinking about this has made me wonder, even today “Who gets to decide what is clean and what is not?”  PULSEROLLER has offered washdown rated motor rollers for a few years and we have a solid base of returning customers who come to us when they need them.  Sometimes customers would inquire if we had washdown rated idler rollers to complement the motor roller.  This made us think about developing our own washdown idler roller products.  When we looked at the market, we found some products very reasonably priced, but one would be hard-pressed to say that they would last in a washdown environment.  Often the washdown rated idler roller products had to be disassembled to be cleaned.

So, we were in a quandary: we wanted to make a real washdown idler that would last as long as our washdown motor roller, but how could we show the customer the real value proposition we were making at the price we had to command for such design and quality?

The answer was that we had to find a respectable third-party authority that would certify that our washdown roller products were in fact clean.  When one thinks of items and devices that must be clean, one thinks of the food industry.  There are all kinds of equipment and machinery that come into contact with food and someone has to certify that this equipment is clean and/or able to be properly cleaned.

The National Sanitation Foundation or NSF is one such organization.  They are in the business of creating and managing cleanliness specifications for food handling equipment as well as inspecting and certifying products as clean.  A good analogy would be they are to food equipment what UL is for electrical equipment.  You probably have seen their logo and maybe not know what it meant:

PULSEROLLER has gone to the effort of having our washdown motor roller certified as suitable for a food environment by NSF.  We have also gone the extra step to develop a stainless steel washdown rated idler roller that is also certified by NSF for food environments.  So now we do not have to provide subjective (and possibly filled with Biblical metaphors) responses to customers who ask “are your rollers clean enough for my food environment?”.  The answer is yes.  Now if I could only find that old fly swatter to get my kid to wash her hands properly.