The catering industry is a booming business, with the best in the industry rated such due to their consistently flawless standards. But a business’ reputation isn’t just obtained by their cooking skills, but from delivering impeccable service and faultless observances of food hygiene and safety.
Food safety should be the highest priority in the food and beverage industry, as having a lax system in place could be critical for your company. For example, the most basic regime a kitchen should undertake is to deep clean the premises once or twice a week.
There are also other areas to consider in order to keep a good standard, and ultimately prevent one of the most prominent phrases in the catering industry; cross contamination.
Rotation
Keeping your products as fresh as they can be is of exceptionally high importance within a kitchen, and can be at any point of the service process – whether you’re adding new prep to the storage fridges, or using food from smaller fridges during service.
In a walk in cold room or storage fridge, your fresher produce should be at the back of the shelves, so the stock that was first in gets used first. During the kitchen rush, it’s could be easy to forget which produce goes where and it’s possible for the system to get muddled. To avoid this, make sure your tubs and containers are clearly marked with day-dot stickers stating the preparation day, and indicating use by date, so that food past these have no chance of being served to the public.
Nooks and Crannies
It’s a simple task to clean bigger pieces of equipment, as they’re easy to reach and any grime is often clearly visible. However, in smaller spaces, such as small service fridges, areas that are hard to reach can be neglected.
Areas that fall under this category are the underside of surfaces, such as fridge handles, the inner and outer doors, or storage shelves. During service, these surfaces can get splattered with food without you noticing, and if these places aren’t cleaned regularly then they can harbour bacteria which could spread into the food. It’s important to tackle your kitchen from every angle when it comes to cleaning, with general cleaning to be performed after every service.
Separation
It may seem like common sense, but it’s highly important to denote sections of your fridges to certain foods; i.e. raw and cooked foods. Raw ingredients should be kept on the bottom shelf so that they don’t have the possibility of dripping down on to cooked items; a benefit of having large storage fridges.
Not only is separation good for maintaining health and safety, it aids with the successful running of a kitchen with an organised system in place. If you’re kitchen has space to fit two cold rooms, for example, one fridge could be used for unprepared ingredients, and the other for food prepped and ready for service. This way you can make absolutely sure that your foods aren’t mixing and contaminating each other.
At Paragon Temp, we can help you keep your food and drinks stored at safe temperatures with the best equipment; just contact our refrigeration engineer in Edinburgh! If you have any enquiries about any of our products, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us on 0131 210 0024. Alternatively, you can keep up-to-date with Paragon Temp on our Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus pages.
