From Excel to full traceability: sanitation under control at a protein exporter

Cleantec moved sanitation, consumption and microbiology control out of Excel inside GTFoods, a protein exporter to more than 70 countries, and gained end-to-end traceability, with Epicora alongside through the entire execution.

Client: Cleantec do Brasil
Sector: Industrial sanitation and food safety
What we did: Web platform for managing sanitation, consumption and microbiology
Platform: Responsive web (React, NestJS, MongoDB)

The starting point

Cleantec do Brasil has been a reference in industrial sanitation and food safety since 1994. It works inside food industries to control cleaning, product consumption and microbiological analyses, the process where a sanitation failure becomes a risk of contamination and audit rejection. Critical work that lived entirely in Excel spreadsheets: one for each client, filled in by hand.

It was laborious and fragile. The spreadsheet produced errors, gave no precise control of chemical product surplus and did not connect to the stock inside the industry. The result showed up as waste: the client did not know where the product was being spent, and Cleantec could not anticipate replenishment before running out. For an operation that underpins the food safety of an exporter, keeping this in a spreadsheet is not just inefficient, it is a risk.

One Excel per client, filled in by hand, laborious and error-prone.
No precise control of surplus and no link to stock inside the industry.
Consumption with no metrics and no traceability, hard to prove in a food safety audit.

The turning point

Cleantec came to Epicora to transform the operation: systematize the process and apply leading technology where there used to be a spreadsheet. Instead of digitizing the Excel, Epicora designed a platform that cleanly separates two worlds: the Cleantec technician, who during implementation maps the client's plant and defines how each sector must be sanitized; and the industry's own team, who carries out the sanitation and records consumption and microbiology day to day. Every record on the front line feeds consumption, stock and compliance in the same place.

It was not a system delivered over the wall. A product, development and CS/CX team accompanied Cleantec throughout the entire execution of the project, including in person, during the plant implementation in Maringá, alongside the Cleantec team. It was this close support that ensured the system reflected the real operation of a protein industry, and not an idealized version of it.

The decision that unlocked it

The Cleantec technician defines the sanitation process for each plant; the industry team only executes and records. And every record automatically becomes controlled consumption, updated stock and traced compliance in a single panel.

What we delivered

Shift-based sanitation

Pre-operational and operational shifts, with frequencies, sectors, products, concentration and expected consumption. The industry team records the execution, with an automatic comparison between actual and expected consumption, sector by sector.

Consumption and stock control

Inbound and outbound movements, real-time stock and consolidated consumption, with an ABC curve of the most used products and a surplus consumption alert, which triggers replenishment before the product runs out.

Microbiology with compliance

Reports with 14 monitored parameters (from mesophiles to Salmonella, Listeria and E. coli O157:H7), limits configurable per client and an automatic alert when any parameter exceeds the limit, with a compliant or non-compliant status per parameter.

Dashboards and reports

Dashboards for Cleantec and for each industry (consumption, ABC curve, trends and microbiological summary), with PDF and CSV export ready to take to an audit.

How we ensured it

Role-based access, on the front end and the API

The technician sees only their own clients; controllers are restricted by area (pre-operational, operational or microbiology); the supervisor has read-only access. The permission is enforced both in the interface and in the API, preventing bypass. No company spreadsheet left open for everyone.

Organized and traceable data

Every sanitation, every consumption movement and every report is recorded and linked, forming the end-to-end trail that a food safety audit requires, where there used to be loose Excel cells.

Staging before production

Every change is validated in a staging environment before going to production, with automated deployment and JWT authentication. Live and stable since delivery.

The result

unified panel

GTFoods units

460+

analyses/month

Expected vs actual

consumption per product

In a single month, more than 460 microbiological analyses and the consumption of dozens of chemical products came to be recorded, cross-referenced and traced in a single panel, the same operation that used to live in loose spreadsheets. For an industry like GTFoods, which exports to more than 70 countries and answers to food safety audits, this is the leap that separates trusting the spreadsheet from proving with data. And the control of expected versus actual consumption, product by product, is what turned invisible waste into replenishment at the right time.

The validation did not come only from within: Cleantec began presenting Cleantec Smart CleanControl, built with Epicora, at Mercoagro, one of the main technology fairs of the meat industry, as its innovation showcase.