How Effective Is Your Footwear Hygiene Program?
Footwear can become a pathway for contamination through a food processing facility. Here's what recent research tells us, and what to consider when building a stronger footwear hygiene program.
Your sanitation program probably accounts for food-contact surfaces, equipment, drains, hands, tools, chemicals, and cleaning procedures.
But what about everything walking across the floor?
In a busy food processing facility, employees move between rooms, production lines, support areas, and hygiene zones throughout every shift. Carts and other wheeled equipment may travel many of those same paths.
Every movement creates another opportunity for soils and microorganisms to move with them.
Recent food-industry research suggests that footwear deserves a closer look.
Footwear Hygiene Is a Traffic-Control Problem
Floors may not touch food directly, but that doesn't make them irrelevant to food safety.
FDA specifically identifies floors, drains, carts, and equipment housings as non-food-contact surfaces that may be included in environmental sampling. The agency notes that environmental contamination, without appropriate monitoring and controls, may contribute to finished-product contamination.
The important part is the pathway.
A 2023 study published in the International Dairy Journal evaluated the transfer of Listeria spp. and Salmonella across flooring by contaminated processing boots and trolley wheels in a simulated dairy environment. Researchers demonstrated that both could act as vectors across flooring. Trolley wheels transferred the microorganisms farther than boots in the study's linear model, while accounting for human stride suggested contaminated processing boots could disseminate Listeria over considerable distances under certain conditions.
More recent research has reinforced the concern.
A 2024 study of a frozen potato processing environment found Listeria monocytogenes in 36.7% of 607 environmental samples collected around a freezing tunnel and its surrounding area. The researchers identified shoes as a likely transmission route within the facility and also found that inconsistent cleaning and disinfection was associated with the continued presence of L. monocytogenes.
36.7% of environmental samples in one frozen potato processing study tested positive for L. monocytogenes. Researchers identified shoes as a likely transmission route.
That's not a statistic to apply to every food plant. It was one facility and one study.
What it demonstrates is something more useful: contamination can move, and understanding how people and equipment move through a facility is an important part of controlling it.
A 2025 follow-up using whole-genome sequencing found L. monocytogenes persistence in the same frozen potato processing environment over at least three years. Employees' shoes and a tool cart's wheels were identified as potential transmission vehicles.
Your hygienic zones may be clearly defined on a plant map.
The people walking between them don't stay on the map.
See how BLX footwear hygiene systems can help strengthen critical transitions throughout your facility.
A Dirty Boot Creates Two Problems
Footwear hygiene isn't simply about applying sanitizer.
Before chemistry can work effectively, you have to consider what might be standing between it and the surface you're trying to sanitize: food residue, soil, organic matter, and the tread of the boot itself.
A 2025 Journal of Food Protection study examined cleaning and sanitizing procedures for personal protective equipment used in dairy facilities, including boots.
The results are worth paying attention to.
On boot soles, the sanitizers tested produced reductions of 0.93 to 2.32 log CFU/in² of Listeria innocua. When organic matter was introduced, the antimicrobial efficacy of all sanitizers dropped to less than a 1-log reduction. Boots with wider and deeper tread patterns were also more difficult to sanitize than boots with shallower tread.
Photo credit: Epik Workwear
When cleaning protocols were incorporated, including approaches using mechanical action, researchers achieved reductions of at least 3 log CFU/in² across the PPE tested. The study specifically highlights scrubbing as an important step in reducing Listeria on PPE.
In other words:
What is stuck to the boot matters. So does how you remove it.
That's an important distinction when evaluating footwear hygiene equipment.
A system shouldn't simply expose footwear to chemistry. The program needs to account for physical soil removal, tread patterns, appropriate chemistry and concentration, and the actual conditions inside the plant.
Mechanical action has a job to do. Chemistry has a job to do. An effective program considers both.
BLX systems are available in manual, automatic, compact, and walkthrough configurations to address different cleaning requirements and plant traffic patterns.
How Effective Is Your Current Footwear Hygiene Program?
Having a boot scrubber doesn't automatically mean you have an effective footwear hygiene program.
The better question is whether your process matches what is actually happening in your plant.
Here are five places worth looking.
1. Start with what's on the boot.
Before thinking about equipment, look at the footwear coming off your production floor.
What is collecting in the tread?
Are you dealing primarily with light soils or substantial organic material?
Are soles the primary concern, or is material collecting along the sides of boots as well?
The 2025 PPE research found that tread configuration affected sanitizer efficacy, with wider and deeper lugs proving more challenging to sanitize.
That makes brush placement and mechanical action important considerations.
A sole-only cleaning system may be appropriate for one environment. Another application may benefit from cleaning the sole and sidewalls.
Start with the soil, not the equipment.
2. Follow the traffic.
Where employees enter is only part of the equation.
Where do they go next?
Map the movement between entrances, locker rooms, raw areas, production zones, high-care or RTE areas, sanitation points, break areas, coolers, loading areas, and exits.
Then add carts and other mobile equipment to the same map.
A 2025 FDA warning letter offers a real-world illustration of why this matters. FDA reported Listeria spp. on wheels of carts that moved between a main processing area, cooler, and loading dock. During related sampling, Listeria innocua was found on rolling-cart and pallet-jack wheels as well as floors and a floor drain, while L. monocytogenes was detected on a cooler floor near a loading dock. FDA also described areas with pooling water and food residues traversed by foot and cart traffic.
That example does not establish footwear as the source of the contamination.
It illustrates the larger point:
Traffic connects environments. Don't forget what's rolling through.
Footwear is only part of the traffic moving between hygiene zones. Carts, pallet jacks, and other wheeled equipment can cross many of the same pathways. For transition points where both foot and wheel traffic need to be considered, the SLX Entryway Foamer provides automated entryway sanitation designed to apply chemistry across the floor as traffic moves through.
3. Don't create a bottleneck people want to avoid.
A footwear hygiene station can be technically capable and still be poorly suited to the facility.
Consider what happens during shift changes.
How many employees need to move through the hygiene point?
How long does the process take per person?
Is the system being used entering production, leaving production, or both?
Does the workflow make the intended hygiene behavior intuitive?
How many employees need to move through the hygiene point? How long does the process take per person? Is the system being used entering production, leaving production, or both? Does the workflow make the intended hygiene behavior intuitive?
A compact single-user scrubber and a high-throughput walkthrough system solve different operational problems.
The right equipment should fit the way your people actually move.
That's one reason the Clean Logix BLX line includes compact and walkthrough systems as well as manual and automatic configurations. Current BLX models range from the BLX-100 Single Manual Boot Scrubber and BLX-200 Walkthrough Manual Boot Scrubber to compact automatic systems and larger automatic walkthrough configurations.
Compact footprint? High-throughput entry? Manual or automatic?
4. Make consistency easier.
An SOP can specify exactly what should happen.
The equipment still has to make it practical for employees to do it, shift after shift.
When evaluating a footwear hygiene system, consider how employees interact with it:
Is activation manual or automatic?
How much employee involvement is required?
Does the system address the necessary areas of the footwear?
Does it accommodate your sanitation chemistry and process?
Is the process intuitive enough to repeat consistently?
Automation isn't automatically better, and manual isn't automatically worse.
The right level of automation depends on the application.
The objective is repeatability.
5. Don't forget to clean the cleaner.
Footwear hygiene equipment operates in a demanding environment.
That makes cleanability, maintenance, and durability part of the sanitation conversation too.
Look at how the equipment is constructed. Can employees access the areas that require cleaning? How are brushes removed or maintained? How does the system drain? Are its materials appropriate for the environment where it will operate?
And don't stop at installation.
Brushes wear. Nozzles can require attention. Chemistry needs to remain appropriately controlled. Equipment should be inspected as part of the sanitation program rather than treated as a permanent fixture that simply takes care of itself.
A hygiene control is only useful if it remains capable of doing the job it was selected to do.
Before You Choose a Boot Scrubber, Look at How Your Plant Moves
There isn't one universally right boot scrubber.
And that's the point.
A facility with twenty employees entering a production area has different requirements than a plant moving hundreds of employees through multiple hygiene zones. A dry environment presents different challenges from a wet processing area. Heavy organic soil calls for different considerations than light debris.
Before specifying equipment, answer five questions:
WHAT'S ON THE BOOT?
Understand the soil load, organic material, moisture, and other debris you're trying to remove.
WHAT NEEDS TO BE CLEANED? Determine whether the application requires sole cleaning, sole-and-side cleaning, or another footwear sanitation approach.
HOW MANY PEOPLE NEED TO GET THROUGH?
Evaluate normal traffic as well as peak throughput during shift changes.
WHERE DOES THE HYGIENE STEP BELONG?
Place footwear controls around actual traffic patterns and hygienic transitions, not simply wherever equipment happens to fit.
HOW MUCH AUTOMATION MAKES SENSE?
Consider employee interaction, consistency, throughput, footprint, and the rest of your sanitation process.
Once you understand those five things, choosing equipment becomes considerably easier.
One BLX Line. Different Plants. Different Problems.
Clean Logix designed the BLX Employee Hygiene line around a simple reality: food processing facilities aren't identical.
Different plants have different footprints, footwear, traffic volumes, soil loads, sanitation procedures, and hygienic zones.
That's why BLX isn't a single boot scrubber.
The current lineup includes manual and automatic systems, compact models, sole scrubbers, and walkthrough boot scrubbers, giving facilities multiple ways to build footwear cleaning into their sanitation process.
For more compact applications, the line includes systems such as the BLX-100 Single Manual Boot Scrubber as well as the BLX-600 and BLX-700 Compact Automatic Boot Scrubbers.
For applications where traffic and throughput call for a walkthrough approach, BLX options include the BLX-800 Automatic Walkthrough Boot Scrubber, BLX-900 Automatic Walkthrough Sole Scrubber, and BLX-1000 Automatic Walkthrough Boot Scrubber.
The question isn't: Which boot scrubber has the most features?
It's: Which system solves the problem happening in your plant?
Tell us about your traffic, footprint, footwear, and sanitation process. We'll help you narrow down the BLX configuration that makes sense.
Take a Walk Through Your Own Plant
There's a simple exercise you can do before changing a single piece of equipment.
Walk your facility.
But this time, look down.
Where are people coming from?
Where are they going?
What are they stepping through along the way?
Where do carts and other mobile equipment cross those same paths?
Where does one hygiene zone become another?
What happens to footwear at each transition?
And, importantly, is your current footwear hygiene process designed around what you just observed?
Recent research isn't telling food processors that every boot is contaminated or that a boot scrubber can eliminate every contamination risk.
It's telling us something much more practical:
Footwear can be a pathway. Organic matter can make sanitation more difficult. Mechanical cleaning matters. And movement through a facility deserves attention.
That's a pathway worth controlling.
A Smarter Way to Clean Starts From the Ground Up.
Sources & Further Reading
Lindsay, D., Cortez Alvarado, K., Nowakowsky, K., & Ellis, R. (2023). Listeria spp. transfers further from boots and wheels across flooring surfaces, compared with Salmonella, in the dairy context. International Dairy Journal, 145, 105734.
Environmental monitoring of a freezing tunnel and its close surroundings in the potato processing industry: Insights into Listeria monocytogenes contamination, cleaning and disinfection efficacy, and transmission risks. Food Control (2024).
Determination of an Effective Sanitizing Procedure for Listeria innocua in Personal Protective Equipment Used in Dairy Facilities. Journal of Food Protection, 88(3), 100455 (2025).
Unravelling Listeria monocytogenes persistence in frozen potato processing: Insights from whole genome sequencing analysis. International Journal of Food Microbiology, 441, 111334 (2025).
U.S. Food & Drug Administration. Environmental Sampling.
U.S. Food & Drug Administration. Gracie's Kitchens, Inc. Warning Letter, September 3, 2025.
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