Thanks! I assume there is *some* interval in which we would have to clean though? I don't want to introduce water to the process when there is none but it seems odd to me that you wouldn't have to clean eventually.
By "clean" I assume you mean with water/sanitizer? The reason to use sanitizer & water is to sanitize surfaces in order to reduce micro growth/buildup. There are very limited opportunities for micro growth in oil (except when you start adding water). We very seldom ever introduced water into our lines unless we were blending a colored or distinctly flavored product (and it was too expensive to purge with oil) or if we somehow introduced a foreign material into our process.When we did blend colored products, we tried to keep it as minimally intrusive as possible (introducing the color at the last possible step) to prevent from having to "clean" the whole processing line. I would consider a purging of the previous run to be a cleaning process, being you're flushing out previous product and you aren't at risk for micro growth.
If your line sits idle for days at a time though, you might consider using some kind of cleaning agent to run through your system to prevent off-flavored oil due to increased peroxide values or free fatty acids. We didn't worry about this because we ran our lines on multiple shifts everyday.
We did clean Zone 2s in the area (conveyors, bottle handling equipment, etc.) everyday with sanitizer. However, there was no set frequency for "water cleaning" the hoppers, liquefiers, blenders, or product lines.