What makes a tanker food grade?

When your major account asks you to do a Kosher load, you do it.

Hoffman LaRoche's 2 NJ plants accounted for 1/3rd of our business and they knew we had the stainless pumps for other products we delivered there.

Besides we charged extra and they never questioned the amount.

 

If they are paying for it they can do whatever they want.

 

When I was hauling fuel we used to have what was known in the fuel industry as a buffer load, Depending on what you were hauling next usually if it was going from say Diesel to Petrol no buffer was required, however some types of fuels required a buffer load before you could load the actual product in some cases though, if you were required to load Aviation fuel a complete clean out was required. I thought may be with food grade they could also do a buffer of some kind before loading another type of product that would clash with the previous load. With food grade for human consumption I guess they would have to be more careful as to what was left in the tank on the prior load. Which is why I gather that milk tankers just only haul milk and never mix other liquids in the tanker.

 

I never pulled food grade tankers before but I was told that they have to have special gaskets, white ones, not like the black ones we use for petroleum and chemicals.

Also, I've seen some pneumatics hauling flour and they have seals on everything, not just the dome lids and pipe caps. They even have them on the hose tube doors.

 

Same reason almost all chemical tankers are smooth bore, unless it is strictly dedicated to one product. You have to be able to clean them. Some chemicals can react with others and contaminate the load or worse.

 

It's mostly a customer thing. I worked for a smaller tanker company in Ontario Canada. We hauled milk and liquid sugar mostly but sometimes orange juice from the states. We got a few customers because we did not haul chemicals of any kind. The customers didnt want any chance of a mistake happening. So theoretically all their trailers were food grade. But it wasn't like it was written in stone somewhere. The company just didn't want to haul chemicals so they didn't. Back then in Ontario we used a CIP wash system with 3 or 4 permanently mounted spray balls inside the trailer instead of a spinner system. It was a common setup for milk trailers to be washed out and sanitized. It allowed the trailers to be baffled too when we first went to New Jersey to load orange juice off the docks the loader was beside himself about the spray balls and plumbing inside the tank. He was worried that there could be residue inside the balls etc. We had to get a note added to the wash ticket saying that they flushed the CIP wash system out and sanitized it too. Plus everything had a wash ticket seal on it.

 

Actually at Matlack the head cleaner scheduled tomorow's trailers depending on what was in them when they came in.

Stainless steel, like all metals, has tiny pores that can hold residuals.

Dark products like some lube oil additives cannot be followed by any clear solvent-like liquid but could be followed with a plasticizer or any other off-white product.

Chemical contaminations tend to run up serious amounts as some chemicals are worth a lot per gal. or pound and then you end up paying to replace the product [including any that was already in the receiver's tank] then pay for the 'clean' load to follow plus any customer downtime and storage tank cleaning cost and the disposal of the contaminated product.

Against everyone's advise, my manager booked a one-off load of newsprint ink. Took our cleaning staff 3 months of solvent and caustic re-wash to get that tank clean enough for a 'system' load of a brown product to get rid of it.

After a year of bouncing around the country re-cleaning at various company cleaning stations, it found it's way back coming in after a load of ethanol but it took a lot of loads and re-washes to get clean enough to ship ethyl.

 

All the gaskets I have seen on our food grade tankers are black. No idea what they are made of, but the look and feel like regular old rubber.

We haul a placarded hazmat chemical in those same tanks, but it's a derivative of oranges so I guess that's OK.

 

CB Smith?. See them at a few of our regular stops.

 

You are probably hauling either Dilimaline or citric acid. I have been to Tropicana in Indian Town Fl and Plant City hauling out those products in regular chemical tanks. All they required wash a regular clean out slip and no odor.