Designing Safety Labels for Food Processing Equipment
Food safety is dominating headlines right now. A cyclospora outbreak has sickened thousands of people across more than 30 states, with Michigan health officials pointing to lettuce or salad greens as a likely – though still unconfirmed – source. It's a reminder that in food and beverage production, contamination risk isn't hypothetical, and the margin for error in sanitation is razor-thin.
That pressure runs straight through to the equipment itself. For food and beverage processing equipment, the cleanliness of the environments they're used in is absolute. Every night, production floors transform into a battleground against pathogens. Machinery often faces a brutal sanitation ritual: blistering high-pressure hot water blasts (often exceeding 1,500 PSI at 80°C) followed immediately by highly corrosive alkaline detergents, chlorinated cleaners, and harsh acid sanitizers.
This can create difficulties in ensuring that safety messages, warnings, and instructions on equipment remain in place and visible. Equipment manufacturers and design engineers work hard on machinery risk-reduction methods identified through the risk assessment process, then may develop on-product labels, warnings, and instructions as they apply the hierarchy of controls. While best practices for the warning message itself are important, so is the need to review the product's environment of use and, in the food and beverage industry, the type of sanitation process that will be used.
If you're responsible for these on-product safety labels, durability isn't optional. It's the difference between a warning that survives the wash-down and one that doesn't. The materials used to manufacture your labels directly affect the risk of injury or death, as well as your company's liability exposure. When the wrong materials are chosen, it's not a matter of if a label will peel, fade, or delaminate under this kind of chemical and thermal assault — it's when.
And every failed label leaves workers unnecessarily exposed and adds to your company's product liability risk. That's the impact of just one label failing. Now multiply that across an entire equipment line running the same daily sanitation gauntlet, and the safety and liability stakes compound fast.
Why Material Choice Matters
Your safety labels are only as good as the materials used to produce them. It doesn't make sense to invest thought, time, and expense into a well-designed safety label system, only to then undermine it with the wrong materials.
That's why Clarion Safety uses the highest quality adhesives, base materials, and overlaminates in our products. We offer high-performance materials backed by decades of combined experience across thousands of customers and hundreds of industries. When standard materials aren't the right fit for a specific application, we work directly with you to identify a better solution.
Color plays a role here too. Safety label colors need to meet ANSI and ISO color tolerance standards. This is not just for compliance, but because color-coding helps people quickly recognize hazard severity. Clarion Safety's founder chaired the ANSI Z535.1 Safety Color Code standard for 14 years, and our label pigments are selected for the same kind of long-term stability used in exterior automotive paint. And, we continue to be on the forefront of the science behind color and color stability. Our director of standards compliance, Angela Lambert, is the current chair of ANSI Z535.1; in her role at Clarion Safety, Angela collaborates with manufacturers – as well as industry partners and advocates – on labels, signs, and markings to put that knowledge into practice.
Built and Certified for Demanding Environments
Clarion Safety's standard label constructions are UL® Recognized and meet the UL 969 standard for marking and labeling systems, and our materials comply with RoHS and REACH requirements. For equipment operating in harsh or specialized environments, we also offer materials engineered for specific conditions, including adhesives resistant to solvents and washdown exposure, high- and low-temperature adhesives, UV-resistant overlaminates, and adhesives formulated for bonding to both low and high surface energy substrates.
Bringing It Back to the Plant Floor - and Helping to Ensure Your Warnings are Effective
For food and beverage processing equipment manufacturers, this all comes back to one question: will your safety labels survive the exact sanitation process your equipment goes through, for as long as that equipment is in service? A label that's rated for general indoor use isn't necessarily rated for daily exposure to high-pressure hot water and aggressive alkaline or acid-based sanitizers.
That's the conversation worth having before labels ever go on the machine. Clarion Safety offers a free label consultation where we can review current visual safety communication best practices under ANSI Z535 and ISO 3864, walk through material options suited to your equipment's specific washdown and sanitation environment, and think through how those labels need to perform across your product's full lifecycle – not just at installation. Contact us to schedule your consult today!
