According to a survey, 66% of people are not willing to revisit a restaurant with bad food hygiene or terrible kitchen cleaning standards!
Statistics also show that failing to maintain hygiene in a restaurant’s kitchen could result in the loss of up to 2/3 of regular clientele. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, hygiene and cleanliness have taken on a significant role in people’s lives. People today pay far more attention to both their own hygiene and the hygiene of the places they visit.
Kitchen cleaning has the potential to be one of the key factors in customer retention for restaurant owners. But when you run a busy restaurant, managing & monitoring regular kitchen cleaning can seem like a tedious process. The staff is constantly moving in and out of the kitchen in an effort to serve each customer promptly. In such a situation, having a plan on how to handle the kitchen cleaning procedure can be very helpful.
If you are an aspiring food outlet owner on the quest to learn how to manage your kitchen & maintain hygiene, then this is the blog for you!
However, this blog will also help restaurants that are looking to maintain their kitchens efficiently.
Table of Contents
8 Must-follow Kitchen Cleaning Tips!
1. Staff Hygiene
Your staff are the first ones to interact with the food. Whether it is cooking, cleaning or serving, their personal hygiene is absolutely non-negotiable. And so, it is always advised to provide them with hairnets, gloves, proper cleaning equipment & disinfectants. This tip would not only keep your customers & food hygienic but also prevent your staff from catching any infection, virus or disease!
A great way to teach your staff about it would be with regular training & audits! This way, maintaining personal hygiene & kitchen cleaning would become a habit.
It has been seen that customers tend to trust food outlets more when they see its’ staff well kept with proper hygiene.
2. Cleaning Your Countertops
Clean countertops are high on the list of kitchen cleaning tips. Almost every cooking-related activity happens on these countertops and a tonne of things are kept on them every single day. Be it the chopping station, the cooking station, the plating or the pickup counter they are always the areas which are always busy. This means they get dirty easily. And so, they are easily one of the most important places to clean in a kitchen every single day!
Also, one essential kitchen cleaning tip is to regularly clean some other common touch points in your kitchen such as door knobs, taps, refrigerator and oven door handles, etc.
3. Clean Your Ingredients Well
If your ingredients & raw material are not cleaned well, then that attracts many severe diseases. It does not affect the customers only, but also your staff. Badly stored food especially meat or baked items rots quicker, attracts bad bacteria & insects, & also affects the hygiene of the entire kitchen.
The best solution would be to monitor your inventory consumption rate & acquire stocks when needed. Another essential step is to invest in good storage machines or cold storage.
4. Clean Storage Is A Must
It’s important to properly store the food items when they are not in use. It is one of the fundamental kitchen cleaning hacks to store food properly and regularly clean the storage space to prevent any germs or bacteria from forming inside it.
- Do not place warm food in the refrigerator. It must first cool, but should be placed in the refrigerator or freezer as soon as possible.
- Leftovers or opened food packets should be packed in a container or covered with plastic wrap.
- Always read the packaging instructions before storing food products.
- When it comes to non-vegetarian food, accuracy in temperature is essential because failure to do so can cause a number of diseases and stale raw meat, which is therefore toxic when consumed.
- Once a week, make sure to clean out the refrigerator and kitchen cabinets to ensure that all expired food is thrown out.
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5. Never Cross-contaminate
You will always find this one point in every kitchen cleaning tips and hack list on the internet. That’s how important it is to not do this ever. Cross-contamination is a major reason behind foodborne illnesses. Here’s what you should take care of:
- Use separate cutting boards for meat, fish, vegetables, dairy, and bread. Label them as meat, veggies, bread etc. to recognise them easily!
- For uncooked and cooked foods, use different utensils.
- Never keep any food products near raw meat & make sure the meat is cleaned well before cooking
- Wash, rinse & wipe all your utensils regularly. Even the ones you don’t regularly use. This way you would make sure you never use old & dusty equipment.
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6. Keep Your Trash Cans Clean
Do not let the food waste pile up in one corner of the kitchen with insects and flies constantly buzzing around it. Keep two closed dustbins for recyclable and non-recyclable trash in your kitchen. Make sure you regularly throw out the trash and recycle as much as you can.
7. Clean chopping boards
The average cutting board has 200 times more faecal bacteria than a toilet seat, says Charles Gerba, PhD, a microbiologist at the University of Arizona. Well, that is gross & straight-up unhygienic! Hence, a great tip in kitchen cleaning would be to clean & change your kitchen chopping boards often. You can thoroughly wash it with hot water and detergent after every use to prevent bacterial growth on it.
8. Thoroughly Cook Your Food
According to WHO, you should never hurry any meal preparation since undercooked food may contain bacteria that cause indigestion and, in the worst case scenario, food poisoning. Make sure to properly boil the meat when cooking or preparing meat, especially red meat, to eradicate dangerous bacteria.
To keep your restaurant clean and free of any foodborne illnesses, use these 8 kitchen cleaning tips. Taking your restaurant’s hygiene seriously will prove to be very beneficial for your restaurant in the long run.
Hope this blog was helpful! Stay clean, cook clean & eat clean.
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