Equipment Materials - Powder Coating?

Greetings all,

Im googling to death trying to find out whether or not its acceptable from a food safety perspective and BRC to powder coat MAchine safety guards (yellow and black) that are above the line of open product.

the site is upgrading machine guarding and currently they are metal guards with essentialy stickers on.

The site wants to redesign and fabricated the guards and have them pwder coated yellow and black and im not sure if this would raise non-conformity or not!

where does the food safety law stand on this?

where does BRC stand?

any links to legislative points welcome.

Good day DavidAR

While in my own opinion building the guards out of stainless steel would be best, however not always practical.  We dry powder and sifter assembly which had been painted numerous times had once again begin to deteriorate.  I like you looked at powder coat as a better alterative to regular painting and it was.  It will outlast any regular painting you do.

As I was talking to the powder coat people about our application they recommended plating the metal with a non-corrosive metal.  So I found several other food companies near me use "electroless nickel" plating it comes in various thicknesses and is applied the same way the finish is applied to wrenches and other tools.  The company did offer other plated finishes but I do not believe the colors your looking for would be an option.  Our item was a 1.3 meter dia plate and a 1m dia by .5m tall and it ran us $900us, while the same items in powder coat were going to be about $700 and this included blasting and prep.  I can send pic if you would like

G

Hi Charles,

currently our guarding is lacking its kind of a thin grid like bar system. they are going to use metal sheeting to make a cover that goes right over it with an interlock i presume.

This would be SS or aluminum or somthing similar and they wish to colour it using powder coating. 

Personally i dont see a problem with it, pwder coating is used on car wheels and and stands up to the test of time usually in that scenario.

I was just wanting to make sure that there is no BRC or food safety issue from a legislative POV to say we shouldnt or cant use.

Technically we could risk assess it and determine food safe but not neceserily food grade by definition due to material used for powder coating?

The guard it self would sit over a cutting roller to which food material would be passing over so if anything did come off, potentialy it could fall unoticed in to product.

but then if it did it would be so small it would choke or cause harm in its cured form, i guess?