Home / Clean isn’t enough: Avoid cross-contamination in your restaurant
Follow these five steps to effectively clean, sanitize and disinfect the customer-friendly areas of your restaurant.
The cleanliness of your restaurant plays a big part in customer satisfaction. Not only do you want to give the appearance of being clean, which reassures guests they are eating in a good establishment, but you also want to practice safe food handling, so they are safe from foodborne illness.
In a restaurant, there are three levels of cleaning: cleaning, sanitizing, and disinfecting.
At the lowest level, cleaning means clearing dirt, trash, and debris from surfaces with a cloth. This makes your dining room and serving area look tidy and inviting, but it’s not enough to protect your guests.
When done correctly, sanitizing kills 99% of bacteria, fungi, and some microbes. Sanitizing solutions must be mixed at the proper concentration and must be left on a surface for at least 60 seconds. If you wipe down a table, menu, or serving counter with sanitizer and immediately dry it, you won’t get the full effect.
Restaurants frequently use cloths or towels made of organic materials such as cotton or paper pulp. These materials break down sanitizer and will, over time, cause the solution to be ineffective. A better practice is to use a towel that’s designed to be used with quaternary ammonia sanitizers, sometimes called a “quat-friendly” towel.
Disinfecting kills bacteria and viruses, but it also must be done correctly to be effective. Disinfectants must stay in contact with the surface for 10 minutes.
Though emphasis tends to be placed on cleaning, sanitizing, and disinfecting the back of the house, to avoid cross-contamination, as much emphasis should be placed on the front of the house.
In the front of the house, surfaces that customers touch should be cleaned and sanitized every time the table turns. These surfaces include tables, high chairs, chairs, booster seats, menus, bar tops, and condiment containers. Self-ordering kiosks or tablets also need to be cleaned and sanitized using technology-safe processes as specified by the manufacturer.
Here are five steps to effectively clean, sanitize, and disinfect the customer-friendly areas of your restaurant.
Foodservice towels that are designed to work with quat sanitizers are a better option than cotton-based towels and bar mops. For example, Tork Foodservice Towels won’t break down sanitizers, rinse clean, and are odorless for a better front-of-house impression.
Another best practice for keeping surfaces clean and disinfected is to employ a color-coding system to help avoid the risk of cross-contamination. Assign different colors of towels for various front- and back-of-house tasks. You might use red for raw meats, green for fresh produce, blue for counters and white for anywhere in the dining area where patrons can see you cleaning.
It’s essential that your restaurant looks (and is) clean, but to protect your customers, employees, and your business, you must also address invisible threats that can make people sick. Using quat-friendly towels, leaving sanitizers on surfaces for at least 60 seconds, and using a color-coding system to separate towels by functional area are just a few of the techniques you can use to keep your restaurant clean, sanitized, and free from cross-contamination.
This content is provided courtesy of Tork, an Essity brand, and a 2019 National Food Safety Month sponsor