What is Kitchen Hygiene and its importance?
Hygiene is the science of preserving health. A hygienic premise should present no risk of illness resulting from the operation carried out therein. Kitchen Hygiene is much more than just cleanliness, it includes all practices, precautions and procedures involved in:
- Protecting food from risk of contamination and allergens of any kind
- Defending against possible pest infestations
- Protecting equipment
- Employee morale
- Legal requirement
- Preventing the loss of customers and reputation
The primary objectives of commercial food businesses is to produce, distribute, store, handle, prepare or sell food at a profit and all the organizations work towards achieving the same.
To ensure a profitable operation, establishment must implement policies relating to all their activities. One of the most important policies is maintaining cost-effective hygiene by implementing a planned hygiene program.
Our role is to help our customers evaluate and identify any potential hygiene risk and to provide efficient and cost effective solutions. In order for us to be able to provide practical and cost-effective solution, we must fully understand the cause of food poisoning and poor hygiene, its operation and equipment used in a food establishment. We will then use our knowledge and skills to develop cost effective cleaning and sanitizing program for our customers.
Essentially kitchen hygiene means the way we prevent foodborne illness by providing safe food to your customer and your staff by safe food handling, control the flow of food (i.e. purchase, receiving, storage, preparation, service), safe facilities and pest management and Proper cleaning and sanitization.
Efficient kitchen hygiene helps our customer to protect their brand image, provide a safe work environment for employee, avoid food poisoning and contamination, comply with the local legislation, health and safety of guest and staff.
A typical set-up of a food establishment consists of the following areas.
- Receiving and Storage
- Preparation
- Cooking
- Serving
- Cleaning and Sanitizing throughout the whole process
What are the factors which influence kitchen cleaning?
In general many of the cleaning tasks in the kitchen still require a lot of mechanical action (manual cleaning). For most effective result, use of the basic constituents of cleaning products i.e. Surfactants, alkali, builder etc is important. Time is an important factor. The longer the contact time the greater the effect of these components will be. For example, Alkalis can saponify fats to soluble soap. However, time and temperature are both essential important factors. An optimum wash result can only be achieved when these four factors are in tune with each other
So if we take the manual cleaning of a piece of equipment via the spray and wipe technique, the effect of alkali will be minimal in helping the loosening of soil. In this case, surfactants are more effective by their ability of lowering surface tension of water. However if this same piece of equipment is soaked in the detergent solution for a certain time, the effect of alkali will increase.
Given the aforementioned reasons, many different cleaning jobs in the kitchens require several different types of products. Different application methods, equipment/surfaces and soils require different approaches. Some surfaces are easy to clean others needs some extra power; many surfaces require sanitizing or disinfecting and not only cleaning.
What are the different cleaning applications in the kitchen?
- Handwashing
- Machine Ware Washing ( machine dishwashing)
- Hand Dishwashing
- All Purpose Cleaning ( Walls, Floors)
- Degreasing
- Sanitizing or Disinfecting
- Descaling
- Glass Cleaning
- Polishing of Stainless Steel Surface
- Silver Cleaning
- Oven/Fryer Cleaning
- Drain cleaning
- Specialty Cleaner ( Presoak, freezer cleaning, Carbon remover, food equipment lubricant etc)
