Restaurants are places where people go to have a great meal and a great time. Unfortunately, they are also the place where many Singaporeans contract food poisoning every year.
Don’t allow your restaurant to be part of this problem. You need to do everything in your power to diminish the chances of ever making any of your customers ill.
This requires, among other things, perfect kitchen and washroom hygiene, flawless sanitary conditions and meticulous care about the food and ingredients, and regularly sanitised staff uniforms.
Here are 7 excellent ways to keep your restaurant in the business and stay clear of random cases of foodborne diseases that can hurt your customers and kill your business.
1. Salad Bar Needs to Be Done Properly
While salad bars are self-serving, you need to make sure that there are members of staff that monitor it and ensure food safety. This prevents people from using the same silverware or even their hands to take more food.
These staff members should also keep away the flies and make sure that the temperature of the salad bar is 5 degrees Celsius or below for cold foods and 58 degrees or higher for hot foods.
2. Be Extra Careful When Offering A Buffet
The same rules go for the buffet as the salad bar. However, the person tending to the buffet should also make sure that no food offered forms a crust. If that happens, the dish in question should be removed and a fresh serving offered.
3. Colour Code Your Wipes
Not all wipes should be used for all types of work around the kitchen. Some are used for handling raw food only, others for cooked food and some are just for wiping glass. It is very important not to mix these up.
Using the same wipes to handle raw and cooked food may allow some microorganisms to get transferred to the cooked food and contaminate it. Colour coded wipes prevent contamination.
In this way, it is always obvious which wipes should be used for which tasks and the possibilities for mixups are minimised. This further contains possible contamination.
4. Insist on Flawless Hand Hygiene
Many of the diseases are transmitted via dirty hands. This means that handling food with anything else than perfectly clean hands is a serious issue and possible health hazard.
If you want your employees to be diligent about their hand hygiene, you need to make it easy for them. This means that you need to have a perfectly maintained washroom with installed soap dispensers, hand sanitisers and hand drying options.
Also, don’t forget about the hand cream that should be available, as well. It will protect your staff hands from cracking, especially around the nails. These little cracks can sometimes bleed and that’s not something that should end up in food.
5. Dress Up Your Staff
A lot of things that should never reach your food are right there on your clothes. The same goes for the clothes your staff wear. To prevent germs you carry with you from making contact with food, make sure your staff has good uniforms.
Uniforms for kitchen staff are only as good as they are clean. Chef uniforms need to be comfortable and cleaned flawlessly. They get their hands dirty and wipe it on their aprons. That stains and stains made by food can sometimes be perfect for breeding bacteria.
Regular washing won’t cut it. You have to make sure that these uniforms are washed to a professional standard. That’s why it pays to rent uniforms from Alsco as we wash them for you regularly the way they need to be washed.
6. Don’t Compromise Safety Because of Turnover
Usually, some foods go slower while other are in high demand. If you want to have a diverse menu, you have to be ready to dispose of some of the food that hasn’t been ordered in a while because it is not entirely fresh.
It may cause some specials prices to rise and that may slow down a business. On the other hand, think about how much a case of food poisoning would slow down your business. You cannot risk it. So, don’t sacrifice food safety because of the turnover. It’s not worth it.
7. Keep Your Washrooms Spotless
There is no way hygiene can be perfect if the washrooms are a mess. That means – invest time, money and effort to make your restaurant washrooms sanitary and clean.
To keep washrooms clean, you should contact Alsco and we will explain how our services will make your restaurant washroom the cleanest ever.
Alsco will also deal with your staff uniforms, hand hygiene, and food wipes. We offer amazing floor mats and many more services that will allow you to make your restaurant a greener, safer and cleaner place.
Moreover, all that we offer doesn’t require capital investment. We’ll simply rent it to you! All of those uniforms and wipes – not your problem anymore. We’ll supply, pick up and sanitise them for you.
Say goodbye to foodborne diseases and hygienic health hazards. Call our representatives today!
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