Mastering the art of commercial kitchen cleaning requires knowledge of the best cleaning and hygiene practices to ensure a safe and healthy food preparation environment. Understanding the difference between deep and regular kitchen cleaning can help you stay on top of routine cleaning procedures, ensuring preventive action is taken to guarantee a clean kitchen.
However, understanding deep vs. regular cleaning, finding effective cleaning materials for kitchens, and understanding the importance of commercial kitchen cleaning can be challenging for newcomers navigating the deep cleaning process for the first time.
To help you get started, we’ve compiled a comprehensive guide to cleaning restaurant kitchens, including vital regular kitchen maintenance tips to ensure a clean kitchen now and in the future.
Understanding Regular Kitchen Cleaning
Regular kitchen cleaning is the foundation of maintaining cleanliness for any commercial kitchen. Regular cleaning ensures that your kitchen follows the best hygienic practices and health and safety protocols for a productive and safe environment.
Regular cleaning encompasses daily cleaning tasks, such as wiping down surfaces, mopping floors, cleaning toilets, and washing dishes – all essential for day-to-day restaurant maintenance.
Some regular kitchen maintenance tips to follow daily include:
- Sweeping, vacuuming, and mopping floors
- Dusting surfaces
- Cleaning interior glass and plexiglass surfaces, like mirrors, windows, and partitions
- Cleaning bathroom fixtures, like sinks, floors, and toilets, and ensuring everything is disinfected
- Keeping kitchen areas, like preparation tables, clean and disinfected
- Wiping down door and window frames
- Brushing away cobwebs
- Emptying the garbage
Though regular cleaning is essential, it’s important to note that this process only highlights visible areas and often neglects hard-to-reach corners and hidden grime. While daily maintenance is a constant cycle that requires help from your staff members, a routine kitchen deep cleaning might require help from outside sources, like a professional kitchen sanitisation provider.
The Necessity of Deep Cleaning
Deep commercial cleaning encompasses thoroughly cleaning your kitchen to remove dust, dirt, and debris, preventing a safe environment. Deep cleaning differs from regular cleaning because it requires more time, effort, and materials, allowing you to remove deeply stuck dirt accumulated throughout your kitchen.
While deep cleaning is a lengthy process, it’s only required once or twice annually, and you can unlock many professional cleaning service benefits by choosing a reliable deep cleaning provider.
Deep cleaning serves different purposes, such as:
HACCP Compliance
Hazard analysis and critical control points (HACCP) is a preventative hazard control system that requires safe food handling, regular cleaning, and periodic deep cleaning to stop the spread of bacteria like E. coli, salmonella, listeria, and staphylococcus.
HACCP follows seven principles:
- Hazard analysis
- Identifying the critical control points in food preparation
- Establishing critical limits for preventive measures
- Establishing procedures to monitor CCPS
- Establishing the corrective actions necessary when monitoring shows that critical limits have been exceeded
- Establishing effective record-keeping systems to document the HACCP system
- Establishing procedures to ensure the HACCP system is working properly
HACCP also ensures that you follow proper fire regulation standards to guarantee a safer working environment and minimise the risk of devastating fires and property damage.
Hygiene
Maintaining a hygienic environment is another critical component of deep cleaning. 44% of foodborne illness outbreaks come from restaurants, and you’re twice as likely to get food poisoning eating at a restaurant than at home. This statistic highlights the need for proper hygiene practices for commercial kitchens.
Even though your countertops, splashbacks, and kitchen equipment are cleaned daily, the build-up of fats and food particles is inevitable over time. Deep cleaning guarantees that every corner of your commercial kitchen, from storage and cold rooms to walls and ceilings, is thoroughly cleaned, reaching corners that daily cleaning won’t address.
Deep cleaning minimises the risks associated with cross-contamination caused by bacteria from spoilage and old food particles while removing grease and carbon deposits from ventilation systems, extractors, and other kitchen equipment – ensuring a safe environment where foodborne illnesses are unlikely.
Maintenance
Equipment like conveyor ovens, deep fryers, grills, and convection microwaves require regular deep cleaning to function optimally. When you avoid maintaining your equipment through frequent deep cleaning, your equipment will have a shorter life expectancy.
Additionally, unclean equipment can result in food product consistency problems, slower cooking times, increased energy consumption, and risks like oven fires – highlighting the massive role of deep cleaning in keeping your restaurant safe.
Health and Safety
Beyond hygiene purposes, deep cleaning promotes health and safety throughout your commercial kitchen. A build-up of grease and food particles, especially on floors, can become a massive safety hazard when your floors become wet and dirty during daily operations.
Deep cleaning removes the residues left behind on floors to restore their original grip, allowing you to prevent slips and falls that harm your staff. By focusing on regular deep cleaning, you foster a safer environment – meaning you can uphold your reputation for serving high-quality, safe-to-consume food in a healthy environment.
Pest Control
Commercial kitchen pest control is a major issue that many restaurants neglect by forgoing deep cleaning. Monitoring food storage areas and the kitchen for stored products insects like weevils, moths, mites, and beetles is crucial to prevent infestations that can present a health hazard to your staff and customers.
Deep cleaning addresses nests, webbing, and larvae that build up in your commercial kitchen, guaranteeing a healthy environment. Working with professional services for commercial cleaning will help ensure food safety and kitchen cleanliness and is much less complicated than managing an in-house janitorial service that might not be equipped to handle pests.
Deep Cleaning vs. Regular Cleaning: Key Differences
Before hiring deep cleaning services for restaurants, it’s essential to understand the key differences between deep cleaning and regular cleaning. The primary difference between deep and standard cleaning is attention to detail and time.
Deep, preventive kitchen cleaning is a comprehensive and meticulous process beyond routine cleaning tasks. It addresses vital grease and grime removal techniques and eliminates bacteria hidden in every nook and cranny of your kitchen. This process promotes a constantly safe and hygienic environment for food preparation that reduces risks for cross-contamination and foodborne illnesses.
Deep cleaning highlights areas of your business facility that aren’t covered during routine cleaning, and working with professional cleaning services is paramount to removing dirt, bacteria, and germs from your workplace that would otherwise go unnoticed.
Some core processes addressed in a kitchen deep clean checklist from a professional cleaning service include:
- Cleaning behind appliances
- Descaling kitchen and bathroom faucets
- Washing the inside and outside of windows
- Cleaning carpets and other soft furnishings
- Cleaning light fixtures and ceiling fans
- Wiping down skirting boards
- Removing dust and cobwebs
- Unclogging drains and pipes
- Washing walls
- Cleaning chairs, air vents, refrigerators, and microwave ovens
- Scrubbing the floor
When to Schedule Deep Cleaning
The frequency of commercial cleaning company hiring varies depending on the intensity of kitchen usage and your local regulations. Generally, a comprehensive kitchen deep clean should be performed at least twice annually.
High-volume kitchens or kitchens that frequently handle raw meat, fish, and dairy products might require more frequent deep cleaning to maintain hygiene standards.
What are the Steps in a Kitchen Deep Clean?
Sanitisation services for commercial kitchens will follow a specific process to ensure the deepest clean possible. The steps of a kitchen deep cleaning are:
- Initial assessment. The first step involves a professional cleaning service like Lotus Commercial conducting a thorough inspection to assess the conditions of your commercial kitchen and identify areas that require further attention.
- Surface preparation. To guarantee optimal cleaning, your kitchen surfaces are prepared by removing loose dust, debris, and items obstructing the cleaning process.
- Degreasing and cleaning. Grease and grime are then removed from surfaces, walls, and equipment, with special attention given to ovens, grills, fryers, and high-temperature appliances to eliminate stubborn grease build-up.
- Appliance cleaning. Next, your kitchen appliances, including refrigerators, freezers, and microwaves, will undergo a thorough cleaning process to ensure the interior and exterior are cleaned and sanitised, ensuring optimal performance and hygiene standards.
- Ventilation and extraction cleaning. Grease and dirt accumulate in ventilation systems and extractor hoods, so during this step, these areas are thoroughly cleaned to reduce fire risks and ensure proper airflow.
- Floor and tile cleaning. The importance of kitchen floor safety for your staff members is undeniable, and a professional service like Lotus Commercial uses professional-grade cleaning agents and techniques to deep clean floors, removing tough stains, grease, and grime. Your floor’s tiles and grouts are scrubbed and sanitised for a spotless appearance.
- Sanitisation and disinfection. The final step for deep cleaning a commercial kitchen requires sanitising all surfaces, including countertops, cutting boards, and food preparation areas.
- Quality control. Following the cleaning process, a rigorous final inspection ensures that every part of your kitchen is deep cleaned and meets stringent standards. If any areas require additional cleaning, a professional cleaning service can address this issue for the best results.
Find a Professional Cleaning Company
Relying on a professional cleaning company with eco-friendly kitchen cleaning solutions is important for everyone who uses your building, so accomplishing your deep cleaning goals with a solution like Lotus Commercial is paramount. Kitchen deep cleaning is not just a routine task – it is an investment in the success and reputation of your food establishment.
By maintaining impeccable cleanliness and adhering to food hygiene and fire regulations, you protect the health and well-being of your customers and employees, enhance operational efficiency, and guarantee compliance with industry standards.
Don’t rely on your in-house cleaners for a thorough, deep clean. Contact Lotus Commercial today to unlock our cleaning solutions!