In the Food service industry, many restaurants face unique challenges in keeping commercial kitchens as clean as possible. Often generating high volumes of traffic, kitchen managers face keeping the kitchen clean multiple times during the day (and evening). For most food service businesses, cleaning is generally divided into front of house and back of house. In today’s blog post, focus is on the back of house, specifically the kitchen and the types of cleaning tools and chemicals used to keep good kitchen practices up to par and safe during normal operations.
The Commercial Kitchen: Tools and Chemicals
While performing a little research, on the Food Service Warehouse Blog, the article “Cleaning Chemicals You Need in Your Commercial Kitchen” caught my eye. In the post, the author explained the importance of understanding why different types of chemicals were needed for various cleaning tasks and which ones should always be on hand. Here are a few of the chemical solutions mentioned:
- All Purpose Cleaner – works on a variety of surfaces while keeping damage to the service at a minimum. Note: all purpose cleaners do not sanitize.
- Quaternary ammonium sanitizers (Quants) – Widely effective and available sanitizers, Quants can be used to both clean and sanitize surfaces. However, quants need a much longer contact time with a soiled surface and, once sprayed on, should be allowed to remain for 10 minutes before being wiped off.
- Bleach – based sanitizers are easy and inexpensive to use for all kitchen surfaces such as counter tops, sinks and cutting boards and more. For more chemical cleaning solutions, check out the Food Service Warehouse Blog. Yes, while its important to have good cleaning solutions to meet different cleaning jobs, it is equally important to have the right cleaning tool on hand so that together with the cleaning solution that cleaning job as efficient as possible. Cleaning tools for the kitchen include:
- Buckets and Pails
- Color Coded Cleaning Supplies
- Kitchen Gloves
- Brushes
- Paper Products
- Souring Pads
Choose Wisely
To be sure, there are many cleaning products on the market today and it can be quite daunting to choose the right tools for keeping your commercial kitchen clean. You do have a choice though. When you select the ‘right tools’ (and cleaning chemicals) ‘for the right job’ you can take the guess work out of know whether the cleaning solution chosen will get the job done. At Century Products, we’ve taken the guess work out of knowing which tool works best with which job. Combined with a good chemical and sanitizing solution, you can go a long way in keeping your commercial kitchen clean and healthy.