According to the Office of National Statistics, there are currently 28,705 licensed restaurants in the United Kingdom. A further 22,970 unlicensed restaurants exist in the burgeoning fast-food sector. Restaurants have gradually gained notable popularity, given the exceptional food offered.
While service and quality are at the center of any restaurant’s success, hygiene is also a constant concern. However, managing the food safety standards needed in the prepping, storage, and service of food can be a major challenge.
Are you wondering how to improve restaurant food safety and avoid the consequences that come with poor hygiene? Here are nine tested restaurant tips every eatery should consider going forward.
1. Always Wash Your Hands
This is the easiest yet most ignored standard rule in ensuring restaurant hygiene.
Did you know that human beings touch their faces an average of 23 times an hour? This is not considering the times you either touch your phone or other contaminated surfaces.
For optimal restaurant food safety, every employee working in a restaurant must embrace habitual handwashing. It would help to ensure handwashing before the preparation and handling of food. Washing your hands with soap and warm, running water for at least 20 seconds can ensure a high level of food hygiene.
2. Consider Sick offs for Any Sickly Employees
On average, employers in the United Kingdom lose around 137.3 million workdays due to sick offs. While these lost work hours have unprecedented financial implications, it’s wise to always consider sick offs for sick restaurant staff. Allowing sick workers to prepare or serve food can pose hygiene-related concerns in your eatery.
It would help to ensure timely reporting of any underlying sickness among your employees. Ensure that sick staff members don’t prepare food or come anywhere close to serving spots.
3. Keep Hands Covered
Every restaurant that’s keen on food hygiene should always stock up disposable gloves. While washing hands is an effective way of maintaining cleanliness, having disposable gloves on the go saves time.
When dealing with a busy restaurant setting, there may not be adequate time to wash up as often. Gloves can be a perfect solution in such instances. Gloves also help to minimize other unseen risks such as germs in long nails.
4. Swiftly Replace Disposable Tools
A common hygiene hazard in the restaurant results from the failure to replace all the disposable tools, dishes, and towels. It would help to consider replacing disposable items as soon as you use them. These kitchen items may become a breeding ground for germs if proper disposal protocol lacks.
It would help to set a standard guideline that prohibits the reuse of disposable tools and products. Ensure the constant disposal of sponges, towels, and other paper products. You might also need to ensure the proper washing of rags to enhance high levels of restaurant food safety.
5. Avoid Cross-Contamination
A common concern when it comes to restaurant food hygiene is the risk of cross-contamination. When food storage practices are a concern, you might likely end up grappling with food contamination.
The general rule of thumb when storing food is always to avoid storing cooked and raw food in close proximity. Most restaurants make this mistake, especially in walk-in refrigeration. It would help to store cooked and raw food in separate spaces to avoid any possible risk of cross-contamination.
6. Ensure You Wash Food Properly
Vegetables, fruits, and other raw food have and underlying susceptibility to germs. As such, you need to ensure special attention when handling such foods to avoid contamination.
Washing your foods thoroughly should be a common practice during the process of food preparation. You may also want to consider approved FDA rinsing products to help enhance your vegies’ overall hygiene.
You might find our food hygiene audits helpful as you learn about the underlying food hygiene standards your business needs to adhere to when using food cleaning products.
7. Sanitize All Surfaces to Enhance Restaurant Food Safety
It’s counterproductive to clean your hands and food if you don’t sanitize the surfaces. Have you been wondering how to be a safe restaurant? Sanitizing all the surfaces regularly would help to restrict any probable inhabitation of pests around the surfaces.
The secret is to sanitize all the surfaces regularly and thoroughly to help keep the working area clean enough. It would also help to consider mild sanitizers during the process of clean-up. You don’t want to end up using products with high concentrations of chemicals.
8. Always Pay Attention to Food Temperature
Food hygiene in a restaurant depends on the right preservation techniques. At the heart of proper food preservation is the need to pay attention to correct temperature standards. Different food products have varying temperature regulations
You might need to keep your food out of the danger zone, which is any temperature between 41 and 135 degrees Fahrenheit. Cold foods should be below the 41 degrees mark at all times. As a general rule of thumb, food should not be in the danger zone for more than 2 hours.
Keeping track of the temperature helps keep dangerous bacteria from your food.
9. Have a Pest Control Program
Pests are often an unwelcome visitor in your restaurant. Nonetheless, these nuisances always find a way into the eatery due to the favorable conditions in the restaurant. These pests are often the cause of contamination and food poisoning.
Apart from protecting your reputation, keeping pests away also enhances restaurant food safety. Ensure that you have a pest control program in place at all times.
These Tips Can Help Enhance Your Restaurant’s Food Safety
Nothing affects an eatery’s reputation more than poor food hygiene levels. Have you been wondering how to approach the issue of restaurant food safety? You might need to consider these personal, collective, and corporate best practices discussed in this article in the course of food handling.
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