Cleaning is a crucial process step within food production, due to its high impact on food safety and considerable high consumption of resources. There are various approaches to optimize cleaning processes, e.g., i) cleaning experiments on laboratory scale, ii) specific soil characterization methods on a laboratory scale and iii) cleaning simulations. This contribution is a showcase for all three approaches combined to understand complex soil behavior, using the example of ketchup. Significantly shorter cleaning times of dried ketchup soil layers are measured when cleaning is performed with 2% sodium hydroxide solution instead of pure water. Counterintuitively, micromanipulation and rheological measurements of the soil layer show a solidification when in contact with sodium hydroxide as opposed to water. This results in a change of the cleaning mechanism from pure adhesive detachment to combined cohesive separation of an interlayer, followed by adhesive detachment of the re-exposed underlying soil. A recently developed cleaning model, which supports the transition between different cleaning mechanisms, is able to describe this behavior. To find a reasonable explanation for the faster cleaning despite higher soil resistance, several methods are currently still required.