Compliance requirements are hard to navigate, especially in a constantly changing regulatory environment. Total Construction shareholder Bill Franks sheds some light on the subject.
For food and beverage facility owners, staying on top of your compliance obligations can be tough at the best of times, but especially so in a constantly changing regulatory environment.
Whereas a big multinational company has a team of people checking compliance, if you’re a Mum-and-Dad business or own an industrial unit where you want to produce food for sale, you don’t have access to that kind of resource.
For starters, it’s important to understand which regulations you need to comply with.
A commercial building comes under the Building Act and National Construction Code; what used to be known as the Building Code of Australia. Section J (Energy Efficiency) of the NCC, along with essential fire services, have been catching people out for a number of years now.
Plus, with the ‘Access to Premises’ standard, a minor addition or alteration to a commercial building can now involve some serious upgrades to services like water, electricity and insulation just to mention a few.
A changing landscape
With changes to Australian standards, some buildings now require fire sprinklers as well. For example, water pressures have changed, and sprinklers now require water storage tanks and a set of pumps, which can sometimes cost around a half a million dollars.
Disability access also needs to be added into the mix of potential changes to a brownfield site, in some instance councils will require a lift be installed, doorways and corridors widened and disability amenities added to satisfy current building codes.
Some other considerations when planning to convert a brownfield site into a food and beverage facility can be noise and odour impacts.
Many councils insist on obtaining noise and odour statements as part of the any submission.
Although the consultant fees to produce these statements can be relatively low, the resulting adaptions to the building can be significant.
In one instance a client was required to install 6.2m high exhaust flues to ensure that odours from its cooking processes were dispersed effectively and did not impinge on neighbouring residential properties.
You may say that is fair enough, however the residential properties were a good 1000m away, yet the odour report indicated that with the right conditions, the cooking odours could travel that far.
Any new food and beverage facility will need to comply with a council’s Health Department requirements, so this will mean effective drainage, washing and waste disposal areas are all well-defined to comply.
Generally, to accommodate new drainage runs and wash areas in brownfield sites you need to cut into the slab, and depending on the amount of drainage required can result the existing slab looking like “swiss cheese”.
These drainage runs will then need to be reinstated and pinned back into the existing slab. In some instances, combining this with set down areas for any freezers, it can be cheaper to lay an entirely new slab.
Weighty requirements
Apart from Council and National Construction Code requirements, brownfield sites can also have issues with the roof weight capacity, as the majority of industrial units available are only designed to support roofing sheets and not much else.
To enable the roof to support numerous services and Insulated Panel ceilings etc. the roof structure generally needs to be strengthened, sometimes dramatically.
One of the key criteria in deciding on premises to convert, is power and gas availability. Again, a majority of Industrial Units only have access to around 100amp supply and no gas feed.
Food and beverage facilities can require in excess of 500amps and a reliable gas supply to effectively run their operations.
The time and cost associated with upgrading and installing these feeds can be exorbitant, and have caught out many proponents, causing major delays in establishing operations.
To make sure your building ticks all the boxes, the first thing to do is to establish the scope of the development, then work out where it might be non-compliant, and if your budget stretches to bringing it up to standard.
You can find a copy of NCC online but it can be difficult to make sense of it if you’re not a lawyer or building professional.
My advice would be to get a report from a building certifier and engage an appropriate food and beverage builder to advise.
By enlisting the services of professionals, you can avoid a host of problems in the future.
Bill Franks is a founding shareholder and director of commercial building company Total Construction, as well as principal of W.H. Franks Constructions, and a member of the Australian Institute of Building. He can be contacted on foodbev@totalconstruction.com.au or 02 9746 9555.
