Owning and running a restaurant is pretty hard work. One of the challenges you must face on a daily basis as a restaurant owner is to keep your restaurant’s kitchen clean. So here is our ultimate guide on how to carry out your restaurant kitchen cleaning that can lighten your load. Maintaining the cleanliness and atmosphere of your foodservice kitchen is an obvious priority. As an outright filthy restaurant will kill your hospitality business quickly, but a messy, poorly cleaned one will have the same outcomes.
Keep your employees healthy and customers happy by learning some simple commercial kitchen cleaning hacks.
Importance of restaurant cleaning
While the statistics seem pretty good for the restaurants and hospitality businesses as a whole, an unclean facility is a surefire way to upset the success of your place. Cleanliness is a crucial component of the consumer experience as this has an observable impact on the amount of spending a restaurant owner can capture.
A food lover will not only avoid places that look unclean or smell fishy, but they will also post their opinions on various social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Yelp. This form of social sharing spreads fast than you can wrap your head around and can ruin a reputation quite swiftly. Add to the equation a failed health inspection, and your business seems to be in real trouble.
A Huge Restaurant Risk: Trip Hazard
While food safety remains the primary driver when it comes to commercial kitchen cleaning, there are some reasons to keep your kitchen clean as well. Wet or greasy floors can result in costly and dangerous slip and fall accidents. Messy storage areas not only pose a tripping hazard, but they can also result in lost or spoiled inventory. Inappropriately-maintained rubber mats can also lead to tripping accidents for your employees. Around three million food service workers sustain a slip and fall accident each year. This costs the foodservice industry approximately 2 billion pounds yearly. Statistics like these should help prioritise cleaning for safety purposes.
Tackling the Challenges in Restaurant Cleaning
Let’s face it, restaurants are busy places and maintaining high standards for regular cleaning can feel overwhelming, especially when different areas need different cleaning approaches. For example, cleaning a greasy floor is a more complex job than simply cleaning the walk-in refrigerator. However, both tasks are essential to keep your premises clean.
The problem becomes more complex when you weigh in young, hourly employees who are not motivated to perform the tough jobs or staff that may not understand the responsibilities wholly because of language barriers. Dedicating training time to cleaning may appear un-economic as restaurants have pretty rapid employee turnover. But training your staff to work in a sanitary, safe manner will help prevent expensive mistakes down the line.
Restaurant Cleaning Ultimate Checklist: When and What to Clean
Owing to a restaurant kitchen’s complexity and size, a checklist becomes compulsory. There are several checklists available over the internet that can be downloaded and printed into a hard copy given to the employees so that each task can be checked out once they get it done. The checklists will also help you divide the work between daily, weekly and monthly schedules.
Daily:
- Wiping down walls
- Sanitising prep area surfaces
- Cleaning the grill, range, griddle, flattop and fryers. Never forget the underside!
- Changing foil lining on top of grills, ranges, and flattops
- Wiping down other equipment: microwaves, toasters, coffee makers, and slicers
- Cleaning beverage dispenser heads and soda guns
- Clean washing sinks
- Washing rags, towels, and uniforms in a washing machine
- Disinfecting waste disposal areas along with the trash cans
- Cleaning floors
Weekly:
- Cleaning oven walls, door, and racks
- Deliming sinks and faucets
- Boiling out the deep fryer
- Washing and sanitize walk-in refrigerator and freezer
Monthly:
- Washing behind the hotline
- Cleaning and sanitising the ice machine
- Cleaning and sanitising the storage freezer
- Running cleaning chemicals through coffee machines
- Cleaning the refrigerator coils.
- Washing ceilings and walls to remove grease buildup
- Washing the vent hoods
Emptying grease traps.
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