There are over one million restaurants in the United States. Yet if there’s one thing that’s essential across every eatery, from sea to shining sea, it’s hygiene. If your restaurant cleaning routine isn’t up to scratch, you’re putting your employees and your customers at risk.
There are some parts of restaurant cleaning that are obvious, like wiping down worktops after every use. Yet what about overlooked spots or hard-to-reach crannies in your kitchen?
In this guide, we’re going to give you a restaurant cleaning checklist to ensure that your premises are kept hygienic and clean for all your customers. Are you ready to learn more? Then keep reading!
1. Ice Machines
Ice machines can be havens for germs. If you’re putting ice into customer’s drinks, it needs to be clean, or you risk giving them a variety of illnesses.
Cleaning an ice machine requires you to disassemble the machine and take each of the parts that you want to clean out. Then you need to use a dedicated ice machine cleaner to sterilize and clean the parts.
You can tell that your ice machine needs to be cleaned if the ice it produces is cloudy, if it tastes or smells strange, or if it melts faster. With regular cleaning, something like a Hoshizaki ice maker can give you years of trouble-free chilling.
2. Can Openers
When you wash up your utensils, you probably think to wash up things like spatulas and knives first, rather than can openers. Yet large commercial can openers get used all the time during food preparation. When they slice through the top of the can, it’s natural that a little bit of the food is going to end up on the can opener blade.
What this means is that if you don’t clean it, you’re going to end up with rotting food on the can opener, which will turn it into a petri dish of bacteria. There’s also the issue that if there are traces of a product that your customer is allergic to on the blade, it could cause an allergic reaction.
Therefore, you need to ensure that you clean your can opener after every use or at least, at the end of the day. Cleaning the blade is easy: simply wipe the blade down with a cleaning agent and a damp sponge.
3. Soda Fountains
If you allow customers to serve their own drinks, it’s almost guaranteed that there is a soda fountain in your restaurant. If there is, then you need to keep it clean. These are hives of bacteria, as the nozzles are very rarely cleaned, and all that bacteria can end up in your customers’ drinks.
This is especially a problem with soda fountains as the syrupy and sweet nature of soda means that there’s plenty of sugar for the bacteria to feed on.
So how can you clean them? You should take the nozzles off the machine and use a chlorine-based solution to kill any bacteria that lurk in them. Then wash your hands and rinse them, before fitting them back to the soda fountain.
4. Menus
What’s the first thing you do when a customer sits down at their table? You give them a menu for them to browse, right? Well, if that menu isn’t cleaned regularly, it’s a breeding ground for germs.
Whether you laminate your menus or not, cleaning them is absolutely vital. If they are laminated, then you should wipe the pages down with an antiseptic cleaner at the end of the day, if they are not, then you should at least clean the menu’s cover with a spray cleaner.
5. Seating
It’s a common complaint for customers. The table may be spotless but what about the seating? Are there crumbs and gunk in the creases of the seat cushions or gum under the chair?
It’s up to you to ensure that seats are hygenic too: to paraphrase a corny old saying, they should be so clean that you could eat your dinner off them. Make sure that chairs, as well as tables, are kept clean, whether they’re booths or individual chairs.
Any high-touch areas like seating are places for germs and dirt. If you want to offer your customers the best possible experience, you need to clean seating.
6. Shelves and Hooks
It’s common sense to clean fridges and to clean your countertops but how often do you clean shelves that store non-perishable ingredients? They may not be as dirty as the rest of the storage areas but they can still harbor germs and they can still offer places for mold to grow. This means that you need to clean them just like you would the fridge.
You should also ensure that the shelves where you keep your pans and pots are clean too. If they aren’t and your saucepan touches a dirty surface, there’s a chance that you could give your customer a foodborne illness.
You should also make sure that you clean any hooks that your utensils touch. These can contaminate your utensils which in turn, can contaminate the dishes your staff cook.
Restaurant Cleaning: Make Sure You Clean Everywhere
Restaurant cleaning might seem like a basic part of owning a restaurant but you’d be surprised how many people miss these areas. It’s very important that you clean all over in your restaurant, including in the areas we’ve listed, if you want to ensure your customers are safe.
If you’d like to read more articles about owning and running a restaurant, check out the rest of our site!