Now more than ever, ensuring that your food service surfaces in your business are clean and sanitized when used to serve your customers. Recent health concerns have developed at restaurants all over the world, and many businesses deal with customers who are dissatisfied when the food they are served makes them sick. Unhappy, ill customers are not only a liability as they refuse to return to a restaurant or other food service option, but they also have a larger threat of being potential litigants in a lawsuit against you. So, what can you do to avoid being another business caught in this trap?
First and foremost, a business that serves food needs to ensure that all local health codes are being followed when it comes to sanitation. Most locales have codes for sterilization and food service preparation that minimizes the chances of a person getting ill due to the food. Of course, this doesn’t always cut the number of people who fall ill, so going above and beyond the minimum, even if it does require extra effort on the part of your employees, is always the best option. Using cleaners that work to debacterialize surfaces or hot water to sterilize surfaces that cannot be leaned with chemically based solvents is a must.
Cleaning with sterile cloths or clean sponges is also recommended, especially given that sponges tend to be harbingers of bacteria, meaning that you may be making the surface worse when you think you are cleaning it off. Ensuring that employees have good sanitation practices in their workstations is important. Apathetic employees likely will shirk their cleaning responsibilities, which can put your customers at risk for bacterial contact.
Make sure that your employees complete their tasks with cleaning properly. Ensure that they are using proper hand coverings and other precautions to ensure that they don’t recontaminate surfaces they just cleaned. Most importantly, ensure that surfaces are being cleaned with materials that won’t cause a different contamination of the food being served. Using chemically based surface cleaners can encourage the growth of some micro organisms.
Above all, making sure that the food being served is being prepared properly itself – misprepared food is a leading cause of surface contamination. Undercooked meats, raw foods, and other products that can be mishandled can create a bacterial mess without much thought by the preparer. If you can heed these warnings and keep your surfaces sanitized and clean, you can keep your customers and your employees safe. A healthy customer ultimately is a happy customer.