Discover Specialist Food Industry Flooring at Hostex 2017

At this year’s Hostex trade expo, Flowcrete South Africa will be showcasing its range of high performance flooring solutions that have been designed to overcome the challenges faced within large-scale food and beverage facilities.

 At stand N5 in Hall 3 of the event, which is taking place at Johannesburg’s Gallagher Convention Centre from 7-9 May, food industry professionals will have the opportunity to learn about flooring solutions that will comply with strict regulations while providing a clean, safe and multi-functional surface for the long term.

Centre stage on Flowcrete South Africa’s stand will be the antimicrobial enhanced, polyurethane range Flowfresh, which is able to maintain a sanitary, slip resistant and easy to clean finish. The hard wearing nature of Flowfresh means that it will withstand the many potentially damaging factors that daily operations within food plants subject the floor to, such as extreme temperatures, corrosive by-products, steam cleaning, point loading, physical impacts, frequent cleaning, traffic from heavy trolleys and more! 

The Flowfresh range has been HACCP International certified thanks to its ability to retain an ultra-hygienic finish within food industry facilities. This means that businesses implementing a HACCP Food Safety Program can rest assured that a Flowfresh floor complies with HACCP’s strict standards. To further minimise the possibility of a contamination incident, every Flowfresh floor includes the antimicrobial agent Polygiene®. Flowfresh has been proven to meet the ISO 22196 standard, which measures a surface’s antibacterial effectiveness on plastics and other non-porous surfaces.      

Additional flooring elements, such as slopes, drainage channels and coving, can be easily incorporated into a Flowfresh finish. This versatility means that designers can create a floor plan that best meets the needs of each food and beverage environment.  

In fact, the HACCP International standard requires floors to provide adequate drainage and cleaning in order to facilitate the fast and effective removal of excess liquid and slippery contaminants. To meet this benchmark, floors should be sloped to drains built into the floor finish, this will avoid water pooling and ensures that waste liquid flows quickly out of the contamination sensitive area.

If stainless steel drains are being applied then a joint should be put in either side of the drainage channel to counteract the fact that the stainless steel drain will have a different coefficient of movement to the surrounding flooring system. Without this joint, the two materials will struggle to expand next to each other during temperature fluctuations. 

Creating drainage channels that integrate smoothly with the floor finish was a crucial aspect of a recent flooring project at Acacia Beverages’ new bottling plant in Lusaka. So that any spillages could be quickly and easily washed out of the area, it was important to install wide drainage channels coated with an impervious finish that would merge seamlessly into the floor. In total, 5,150m² of Flowcrete Africa’s specialist resin flooring solutions was applied throughout the site in a bespoke yellow-green colour. 

If you would like to discover more about specifying floors tailored to the demands of food and beverage facilities, talk to Flowcrete South Africa’s expert team at stand N5 in Hall 3 of the Hostex Food and Hospitality expo.