With so much to take into account regarding the day-to-day running of your restaurant, keeping your premises clean can be a challenge. However, regardless of how hectic your workload is, there’s no excuse for poor hygiene. In fact, failure to abide by health and safety legislation could result in costly fines, particularly if an employee or customer was to become ill as a result of non-compliance.
Here’s our top tips for keeping your restaurant clean and safe:
Train employees
Training employees to operate in a safe and hygienic manner can be a great way of spreading the workload and keeping on top of cleanliness in your restaurant.
Make sure every worker understands what is expected of them and carry out regular assessments to ensure guidelines are being followed. Emphasise that there’s more to kitchen and restaurant cleanliness than simply abiding by Health and Safety legislation. After all, failure to work in a safe manner can make people ill and in serious cases, the consequences could be fatal.
Sanitise surfaces
Regularly clean each surface throughout your kitchen to prevent cross contamination. Failure to keep surfaces clean can lead to the spread of allergens and harmful bacteria.
Although you can control employee hygiene and cleanliness to some extent, you have no control over your customers’ behaviour. As a result, be sure to clean bars, tables, and chairs thoroughly to minimise the spread of dirt and germs.
Don’t forget the restroom
Although you don’t cook or serve food in your restaurant’s restroom, it’s obviously a breeding ground for bacteria. Germs from dirty floors, unsanitised surfaces and filthy facilities can easily be spread from the bathroom to the rest of the restaurant, so it’s important to keep this area as clean as possible.
Arrange for a member of staff to conduct an hourly inspection to ensure that the restroom looks clean and tidy. Although your restroom should receive a thorough clean once or twice daily, a member of your cleaning team should be on call to take care of any urgent hygiene issues if necessary.
Not only can you protect customers by keeping your restrooms clean, you can also minimise the likelihood of bad PR and prove you take customer care seriously. 58% of people class washroom facilities and cleanliness as an important part of their dining experience while 63% said their restaurant reviews are negatively impacted by poor washroom hygiene.
Embrace professional cleaning equipment
As tempting as it may be to use the cheapest tools for the job, you can drastically save time and improve results by embracing professional cleaning equipment.
If the thought of purchasing an expensive machine outright fills you with dread, it may be worth considering industrial cleaning equipment hire. You’ll gain fast access to the tools you need without the hefty price tag. You won’t have to factor a large expense into your budget and instead will pay affordable hire costs each month.
If you decide the tool isn’t right for you or you’d like to try something else, simply let us know and we’ll tweak your contract accordingly or send you a new piece of kit.
To learn more about our cleaning equipment hire service, please get in touch with the team at Clean Sweep.
