Advanced Hygienic Design and Engineering

The engineer had the right answer and lost the room in ninety seconds

Three quotes for the same slicer: an EHEDG certified machine from Europe at R6.1 million, a local fabrication at R2.9 million with no certification, and a refurbished unit at R1.4 million. The engineer wanted the certified machine and he was right. He opened on the hollow blade hub, the area behind the blade guard nobody can reach, and two positive swabs. The financial director looked at a R3.2 million gap and asked what it buys. Nobody had that number, so the board took the local build.

Here is the answer he did not have. That line is cleaned for three and a half hours by four people, so 14 person hours a night, six nights a week over 48 working weeks, which is 288 cleans a year. The capital difference is R3.2 million, not R6.1 million, because the difference is what the board is deciding. Over a 20 year asset life, undiscounted, that is R160,000 a year, and over 288 cleans it is R556 a night. Take 38 percent off 14 person hours and you save 5.3 person hours a night. Divide R556 by 5.3 and you get about R105. The certified machine pays back its whole premium on cleaning labour alone at anything over about R105 an hour of fully loaded hygiene labour, before a litre of water, a drum of caustic or a single late start.

This is the level where you stop judging equipment and start deciding what gets bought, built and signed for. You already know a dead leg from a drainable branch and 304 from 316. Now you score a line and defend the order of work, write specification lines a fabricator can price, gate three bidders before a price is opened, refuse a machine at the factory acceptance test, hold a contractor to a hoarding for nine months, tie the supplier’s last payment to a swab result, and stand in front of a board and an auditor out of the same evidence pack.

Designed with industry leading engineers and technical food safety consultants

Designed with industry leading engineers and technical food safety consultants. The panel behind the material is hygienic equipment design, facilities and utilities, and process and automation engineers, working with food safety specialists, process controllers, quality managers and hygiene practitioners. The engineers set the duty envelopes, the tolerances and the failure mechanisms. The practitioners made sure every requirement can be written into a document, priced by a supplier, verified at a stage and defended in a meeting.

Advanced Hygienic Design and Engineering. Risk assessment, specification, verification and project delivery. Document code FS32-0303. Advanced level, 24 hours, self paced, online, on any phone. R6,500 until 30 November 2026, then R7,900. No discount codes apply to the hygienic design series.

What this course is not

It is not a longer version of Intermediate. It is not a compliance course, and it is not a slide deck of EHEDG logos with a quiz at the end. It is the engineering, the money and the paperwork of a capital decision, with the arithmetic done on the page: the capital difference divided by the life and then by the cleans it has to beat, a finding scored on severity, likelihood and exposure and banded so the band obliges the site to act, a specification line with a value, a verification method and the stage it is verified at, gates signed and dated before any envelope is opened, an EHEDG type and class chosen from how the plant will really clean the machine at 02h00, purge and heat tint written into a weld procedure, a cleaning validation with a soil, a worst case and a limit, and the R638 regulation 6 requirement of not more than 100 viable micro-organisms per square centimetre after cleaning. It expects a project file from you at the end of it, marked against fourteen published criteria. If you want a wall certificate without that work, this is the wrong course.

Buying from outside South Africa

The price is in South African rand. Indicative US dollar and euro equivalents are shown on this page by the currency converter, and payment settles in rand. The spine of the course is international, deliberately, because the people who do this work buy equipment from abroad and sell into export markets. It is built on ISO 22002-100:2025 and ISO 22002-1:2025, on EHEDG Guideline 8 in its fourth edition of December 2025 and the equipment guidelines behind it, on EN 1672-2:2020, ISO 14159 and ISO 5817:2023, on FSSC 22000, BRCGS, IFS and SQF, and on the good manufacturing practice regulations of the major markets, listed in full further down this page. The South African instruments sit in one clearly marked lesson. They are there because a South African engineer answers for them personally, not because the course rests on them.

Who it is for

• Engineering, project and technical managers who sign a capital specification and answer for it afterwards
• Project engineers running a new line or a brownfield upgrade inside a running factory
• Technical and QA managers who have to turn a design fault into a funded piece of work
• Food safety managers asked at audit how the hygienic design requirement was set and how it was verified
• Procurement and category managers writing tenders where the cheapest quote is not the right one
• Consultants running hygienic design risk assessments and legacy reviews for clients
• Equipment suppliers and fabricators who want to know what a competent buyer will ask for and test
• Senior practitioners putting a hygienic design programme to a board for the first time

Who it is not for

This is not an entry point and it does not re-teach the ground under it. It assumes you can already classify a food, splash and non food area, calculate a length to diameter ratio on a blanked branch, select 304, 316 or duplex against a chloride figure and a temperature, read a weld log, and score a design fault in a register. The prerequisite is Hygienic Design Essentials and Intermediate Hygienic Design, or equivalent working experience. If you have the experience without the courses, you will keep up. If you do not have it at all, start at Essentials.

What you will be able to do after it

• Build a total cost of ownership case from your own cleaning hours, water, chemicals, downtime and stated risk exposure, and put it to a board on one page with three options, an owner and a date.
• State the size of a risk exposure and who wrote it down, and never multiply it by a probability you invented.
• Write a hygienic design policy and a decision rights table naming who specifies, who is consulted, who signs and who can stop a delivery.
• Predict the trace an auditor runs through FSSC 22000 clause 2.5.15, BRCGS Issue 9 clause 4.6, IFS Food version 8 clause 4.17 or SQF Edition 9 Module 11, and hold the five evidence objects that close a finding before it is written.
• State what R638, R908, the Occupational Health and Safety Act and the NRCS compulsory specifications put on the person in charge, name who enforces each and what they can do, and score your site on six dimensions of hygienic design maturity.
• Run the hygienic design risk assessment loop on a line, set the boundary so the interfaces and the services are inside it, score every finding on severity, likelihood and exposure, and say what the band obliges the site to do.
• Name the design feature behind each microbiological niche, measure a hold up volume as an allergen route, and stop a detector being recorded as the control for a fault it cannot see.
• Write a user requirement specification to ten headings, in lines a supplier has to price, with a verification method and a stage against every one.
• Build a tender pack that makes three bidders price the same thing, gate before you score, publish weights that add to 100, and defend a recommendation that is not the cheapest quote.
• Read an EHEDG certificate down to its equipment type and class, a 3-A Symbol authorisation and a declaration of compliance, say what each proves and what it does not, and write the contract clauses that make the specification enforceable.
• Specify a joint, a weld, a product line, a vessel, a heat exchanger, an aseptic boundary, a dry line to the right EHEDG ED class, a conveyor and its transfers, and the instruments around them, each as a line a fabricator can price and an inspector can check.
• Specify a floor by fall, element type, material, load class and edge detail and prove it with water, write measurable HVAC requirements and verify them with a manometer, a smoke tube and a thermometer, classify every utility by its contact with product, and control building work inside a running factory from the hoarding to the handover.
• Build a four stage hygiene qualification plan with an acceptance criterion and a signatory at each stage, design a cleaning validation, and commission an EHEDG cleanability test through an Authorised Evaluation Officer and an Authorised Testing Laboratory.
• Run a legacy risk assessment on a plant nobody designed and turn the register into a phased retrofit programme a board will approve.
• Present the same evidence pack twice: ten minutes to a board that wants a decision, and half an hour to an auditor who wants to know how the requirement was set and verified.

What is inside: 7 modules, 41 lessons

Module 1: Leading hygienic design in the business

• The business case: total cost of ownership and the board paper
• Governance: policy, roles, the multidisciplinary team and competence
• GFSI benchmarked schemes and how auditors test the hygienic design clauses
• South African legal duties: R638, R908, the OHS Act and the NRCS
• Assessing a site’s hygienic design maturity

The course opens on a board paper rather than on stainless steel, because a design you cannot fund is a design you do not have. Five cost lines, each attached to a number the business already tracks and already believes, the arithmetic that changes a capital decision, and the discipline of stating an exposure and its source without inventing a probability.

Module 2: Hygienic design risk assessment

• The method: iterative hygiene risk reduction
• Scoring and prioritising: severity, likelihood, exposure and the legacy problem
• Microbiology for engineers: which design feature makes which niche
• Allergen and chemical hazards the design creates
• Foreign body hazards the design creates, and where detection belongs
• Workshop sitting 1: the hygienic design risk assessment on the Mzansi cook chill line

The method is a loop: intended use, boundary, ingress, accumulation and growth tested as three questions rather than three labels, design the hazard out where the design can carry it, and hold what is left with a named control, an owner and a date. The microbiology lesson is written for engineers: which feature makes which niche, why Listeria monocytogenes lives in the building rather than in the product, and why water is the event in a Salmonella dry plant.

Module 3: Specifying and buying equipment

• Writing the hygienic User Requirement Specification
• The tender checklist and supplier scoring
• Reading certificates: EHEDG equipment types and classes, the 3-A symbol, declarations of compliance, material and weld documents
• Contract clauses: factory acceptance test, site acceptance test, documentation, instructions for use, spares, change control
• Running a hygienic factory acceptance test
• Workshop sitting 2: evaluating three quotes for Amanzi Dairy

This is where a food safety requirement becomes a contractual obligation. The test of a specification line is that a fabricator can price it and an auditor can verify it, which is why the words easy to clean appear nowhere in one. Gates before scores, an EHEDG certificate taken apart down to its six type and class combinations, and the factory acceptance test where you can still say no.

Module 4: Design detail masterclass

• Joints and seals: groove design, thermal expansion, compression, gasket selection
• Welding engineering: procedure, purge, heat tint, ISO 5817, inspection, the weld log, non destructive testing
• Flow and drainability engineering: dead legs, reducers, tees, velocity, air pockets, gas purging
• Tanks and vessels: bottoms, agitators, manways, spray devices, venting, insulation
• Heat exchangers, fillers and aseptic principles
• Dry processing equipment: the ED classes, dust, Salmonella in dry plant, dry cleaning design
• Conveying systems: belts, drives, transfers, integration interfaces
• Sensors, instrumentation, electrical enclosures and automation hygiene

The longest module, and the one a fabricator will read over your shoulder. Every requirement is written as a specification line, with verification set at the earliest stage the fault can be seen. A hollow section found at the factory acceptance test is a rework in the supplier’s works. The same one found on your floor is a crane and a programme in trouble.

Module 5: Facility engineering

• Master planning and layout: flows, zoning, expansion, brownfield interfaces
• Floors and drainage engineering
• The envelope: walls, ceilings, doors, insulated panels, penetrations, pest proofing
• HVAC engineering: filtration, air changes, pressure cascades, condensation
• Utilities engineering: water, culinary steam, compressed air, refrigeration, CIP supply
• Construction and installation management during production

The building is equipment, it outlives every machine in it, and it is the part nobody specifies. A floor where water has exactly one way to go, a drainage system with a load class and an edge detail, and a water test at handover before you accept it. Pressure cascades measured instead of claimed, and building work run inside a live factory with hoarding, contractor routes and a daily release sheet signed before pre-op.

Module 6: Verification, commissioning and the lifecycle

• Design, installation, operational and performance qualification for hygiene
• Cleaning validation of new equipment: approach, acceptance criteria, swabs, ATP, allergens
• Cleanability testing: the EHEDG test methods, the open plant cleaning test, fluorescence methods
• Environmental monitoring that finds niches: zones, sampling, trending, seek and destroy
• Maintenance engineering for hygiene: preventive plans, hygienic repairs, temporary repair policy, contractors
• Change management, legacy risk assessment and retrofit programmes

Proving the design works, and then keeping it proved. Four qualification stages, four questions, four signatures, with the money tied to the evidence rather than to the calendar. Three questions decide a cleaning validation protocol, what soil, what worst case and what limit, and only the microbiological limit is set by law.

Module 7: Capstone project, Karoo Meat Processors

• Sitting 3, part one: the brief and the hygienic design risk assessment for the Karoo brownfield upgrade
• Sitting 3, part two: the user requirement specification, supplier evaluation and total cost of ownership
• Sitting 3, part three: commissioning, validation and the retrofit plan
• Presenting to management and to the auditor, and the assignment

The whole course run once, end to end, on one project. It is written differently from the other six: you are not being taught here, you are walked through the work decision by decision with the reasoning shown for each.

The capstone: a R28 million brownfield upgrade, run end to end

Karoo Meat Processors, Eastern Cape, 320 people, polony and viennas, post cook high care. The board has approved R28 million to install a new slicing and packing line inside that high care area while production continues, with a new chiller and a new CIP set for the emulsion lines, nine months from approval. Three sittings build to it: sitting 1 scores the Mzansi cook chill line, sitting 2 buys a filler for Amanzi Dairy, and sitting 3 is the whole of Module 7.

• The risk assessment. A brownfield register covers three things at once, and the third is the one project teams miss: the plant that is already there, the design that is on a quotation and not yet built, and the nine months of construction work in between. Sixteen findings, eleven of them red, one raised and then withdrawn with the reason recorded, and a disposition on every row.
• The specification and the evaluation. A scope of supply for a line and not a machine, because certificates will cover three machines and nothing will cover the eleven metres of conveyor, the four transfers or the place where a belt runs over an existing drain. Then six gates signed and dated before any envelope is opened, six weights adding to 100, a bidder gated out with three reasons written down, and a scored result of 79.0 percent against 63.0 percent. The money is worked the same way as the hook at the top of this page: the capital difference divided by the life and then by the cleans it has to beat, with the calendar stated out loud and the one line you cannot defend left blank with an owner against it instead of filled with a guess.
• The delivery. A four stage qualification plan with R610,000 of the supplier’s money sitting behind a swab result, a construction management plan built on hoarding rather than shrink wrap, a cleaning validation protocol, the environmental baseline almost nobody takes before the work starts, and nine months of phases sequenced by dependency and shutdown window rather than by score, each closed with a re-score rather than with a date.
• The ten minutes. The board slot, minute by minute, with no drawing opened at any point in it, and then the same evidence pack in front of an auditor who asks one question in two halves: how was the hygienic design requirement set, and how was it verified.

You finish holding a project file you can copy onto your own job: a brief, a register, a user requirement specification, an evaluation, a programme, a qualification plan and a note. That is the assignment, and the fourteen marking criteria are published inside the lesson so you can mark yourself before you send it.

The tools you walk away with

Most training leaves you with notes. This one is built so that the week after you finish there is a document with your name on it in an engineer’s hands, in a procurement file and in a board pack.

Alongside the lessons there are seven games, one per module: Auditor’s question, Score the risk, Certificate or claim?, Design detail doctor, Facility fault finder, Validate, verify or monitor?, and The board meeting. Each one puts you on a South African site at the moment somebody has to decide.

The case sites, so you can do the course without a project

Every case pack, every workshop sitting and the assignment run on a provided case site with full data, so a delegate between jobs, consulting or working off a site can complete the whole course. The same three sites run through Essentials and Intermediate, so by this level you know them the way you know a plant you have audited.

• Mzansi Fresh Meals, chilled ready meals in Gauteng, with a hygiene window that overruns 45 minutes twice a week at about R18,000 an hour of late start, of which 33 of the 45 minutes are attributable to design. This is the site for workshop sitting 1 and for the cost attribution that survives a finance director.
• Amanzi Dairy, in KwaZulu-Natal. Pasteurised milk, drinking yoghurt and UHT, closed processing with a tank farm, CIP and aseptic filling, at about 1.2 million litres of CIP water a month. Workshop sitting 2 buys a filler here.
• Karoo Meat Processors, in the Eastern Cape. Polony and viennas, 320 people, post cook high care, on enhanced surveillance with a retailer who has written down a R12 million recall exposure, and running the R28 million brownfield upgrade the capstone delivers.

The cases are training scenarios built from patterns that real investigations and audits keep finding. No company is named in any of them.

The standards and the law this course teaches against

Every design requirement in this course names the instrument that asks for it. At Essentials you learn the rule, at Intermediate you learn the number, and here you learn which document you can hold a supplier or an auditor to and which one is a sales claim. It was built against the clause text itself rather than against a summary, and where a figure is commonly cited industry practice rather than guideline text the course says so, because a number you cannot source is a number you will lose an argument with.

One thing is worth saying plainly before you buy. EHEDG Guideline 8 went to its fourth edition in December 2025, and it is a restructure rather than a revision: every section number from the third edition of 2018 is either gone or now means something else. The fourth edition holds the principles, the criteria and the equipment classification, and pushes almost every number out to the equipment specific guidelines. The 3 mm minimum internal radius is now delegated to the applicable guidelines. The minimum slope figure is gone and is not delegated to anything. Several requirements that were shall in 2018 are should in 2025, notably on supports, on condensate, on the continuity of non product side welds and on the chlorine content of insulation. Most hygienic design training on this market is still written against the 2018 numbering, which will send you to a clause that no longer says what you were told it says. This course is written against the fourth edition, and it says where a requirement moved.

The course is built on those instruments. It is not approved or endorsed by EHEDG, by ISO or by any scheme owner, and we do not claim that it is.

How it is assessed

• Seven knowledge checks, one per module: 15 questions drawn at random, so no two papers are the same. Thirty seconds a question, 70 percent to pass, three attempts.
• Seven games, one per module: 10 questions drawn at random, 45 seconds a question, three attempts.
• A final assessment of 40 questions drawn at random, so every attempt is different. Thirty seconds a question, 70 percent to pass, three attempts, video proctored on any phone or laptop camera, with copy and paste blocked.
• One marked project assignment, out of 20 with a pass mark of 14: a hygienic design project file for one line, one room or one upgrade, on your own site or on the Karoo case, submitted as a workbook of seven sheets named Brief, Register, URS, Evaluation, Programme, Qualification and Note, with a note of 150 to 250 words to your management. Twenty one days are allowed for it.

The fourteen marking criteria are published in full inside lesson 7.4 with their weights, so you can mark your own submission first. They look for what a marker can find: an assumptions cell naming your cleaning calendar, every register row scored on severity, likelihood and exposure, an owner who is a named person and not a department, a disposition on every row, the specification dated before the enquiry and the gates signed before the prices were opened, and a note that names a rand figure, a date and a person. The question bank behind the checks, the games and the final runs to 343 questions written against the lessons. The assignment is marked by a person, not by a script.

Read the free guide first

If you want to see the writing before you pay for it, read the free guide What is hygienic design in food manufacturing, and run the free Hygienic Design Walk on one of your own lines. If you can already score that line, cost the faults and rank them, and what you are missing is the specification, the tender, the commissioning evidence and the ten minutes in front of the board, this is the course.

Where it sits in the series

This is course 3 of 3. Course 1, Hygienic Design Essentials, teaches the ten rules and the eye to use them. Course 2, Intermediate Hygienic Design: Equipment, Materials and the Food Factory, takes it into hygiene levels, materials and corrosion, closed equipment and CIP, open equipment and conveying, the building and its services, and a scored risk register. Essentials teaches you to see a fault. Intermediate teaches you to specify the fix. Advanced teaches you to get it bought, built, proved and signed for.

Questions people ask before they enrol

Do I have to do Essentials and Intermediate first? Those two or the equivalent working experience, yes. This course does not re-teach the ten rules, the EN 1672-2 areas, steel selection, dead leg arithmetic or the basic register, and it uses all of them from lesson one. If you select steel grades against a chloride figure, read weld logs and already run a register, come straight here.

Do I need an engineering background? You need to be comfortable with numbers and with documents. You will divide a capital difference over a life and a cleaning calendar, work a break even in rand per hour, score sixteen findings on three scales and weight six criteria to 100. Every method is shown on a worked example first, with the arithmetic done on the page.

Is this course accredited? ASC Food Safety Consultants is a training provider whose courses carry HPCSA CPD accreditation. Your certificate of completion carries a QR code that verifies the holder, the course and the date. The course is built on the EHEDG guidelines, the ISO 22002 series, EN 1672-2, ISO 14159, the GFSI benchmarked schemes and South African law, but it is not approved or endorsed by EHEDG or by any scheme owner, and we do not claim that it is.

I am outside South Africa. Will it apply to my plant? Yes, and it is written that way. The standards, the scheme clauses and the GMP regulations of the major markets are the spine of it, and the specification wording, the tender pack and the qualification plan are written against them. The South African law sits in one marked lesson. You pay in rand and the page shows indicative dollar and euro equivalents.

Do I need a live project to do it? No. Every case pack, all three workshop sittings and the capstone assignment run on the provided case sites with full data, and the Karoo route through the assignment is marked exactly like a submission from your own site.

Will it help with my FSSC, BRCGS, IFS or SQF audit? It teaches the equipment and premises clauses directly, and more usefully it teaches the two traces an auditor runs through them and the five evidence objects that close a finding before it is written. It is not a clause by clause course on one scheme, so read your own standard alongside it.

Can my whole team do it? Yes, and on this course it is worth more than on the other two. The value shows up when the project engineer, the technical manager and the procurement manager score the same project, sign the same gates before the prices are opened, and have to agree on which three phases get funded. Teams of five or more should contact ASC for a group arrangement.

How long do I have access, and what if I fail? The course is 24 hours of lessons, games, checks, workshops and tools, self paced, with lifetime access, so most people run it over several weeks alongside a real project. Knowledge checks and the final allow three attempts, with different questions drawn each time. The assignment allows 21 days and the marking criteria are published. If your company needs a set access period stated on a purchase order, ask ASC before you enrol and it will be confirmed in writing.

About the trainer

Trainer: ASC Team. This course was compiled by the ASC Food Safety Consultants team with the help of a panel of industry engineers (hygienic equipment design, facilities and utilities, process and automation), food safety specialists, process controllers, quality managers and hygiene practitioners, and built on the EHEDG guidelines, the ISO 22002 series, EN 1672-2, ISO 14159, the GFSI benchmarked schemes, the GMP regulations of the major markets and South African law.

Enrol

R6,500 until 30 November 2026, then R7,900. No discount codes apply to the hygienic design series. The price is in South African rand, with indicative US dollar and euro equivalents shown on this page and payment settling in rand.

Designed with industry leading engineers and technical food safety consultants. Self paced, online, with lifetime access, so you start today and run it alongside the project you are already on. You will come out of it able to write the specification, gate the tender, refuse the machine, control the contractor, prove the clean, and put the case to the people who control the capital.

Teams of five or more: contact ASC for a group arrangement and we will invoice the company against your purchase order.