A New Restaurant

Is your restaurant a sanitary food environment, or is it merely clean?  It is an important distinction, and one that successful restaurant managers need to be aware of.

Clean means that the area is free of dirt.  Sanitary means that it is free of dangerous levels of germs and pathogens.  If you sweep and mop a floor it is clean, but you still probably would not want to eat off of it.

Why?  Because it is not sanitary.

As a successful restaurant manager you want to make sure that the food contact surfaces in your restaurant are both clean and sanitary.  That means that you need to have good cleaning and sanitization procedures in place, and you need to inspect the work to make sure that it meats your standards.

The difference between clean and sanitary is a distinction that many people miss.  Because they don’t see dirt they fell like everything is OK.  The problem is, your eye can not see the germs that may be crawling all over the surface.

For instance, suppose your cook was cutting raw chicken on a cutting board.  When he was done he wiped the cutting board and the knife with a damp rag and then started to prep vegetables for tonight’s salads.  Because he wiped the surface it appears to be clean, but all of the pathogens from the raw chicken are still crawling all over the knife and the cutting board, and those germs are now contaminating the raw salad veggies.

On the other hand, your customers may freak out over a bit of food that was stuck to the tine of their fork.  However, because that fork went through a high temperature sanitization, the fork is sanitary, even though it is not clean.  The customer has a much greater chance of getting sick eating the contaminated salad then they would by using the dirty fork.

Your restaurant should establish a policy of having pails of sanitizing solution available, and ensuring that your staff use that solution.  Every time your cooks move from one task to another they should get into the habit of sanitizing their area.  When you servers are bussers wipe down a table they should do it with sanitizer.

It is a very inexpensive way to reduce the chances of a food borne illness outbreak in your restaurant.  You can use a bleach solution that is 50 to 100 ppm to get the job done.  That is about a capful of bleach for every gallon of water.

Don’t worry about everything smelling like bleach.  At that level of concentration it should have no odor.  In fact, if you smell bleach you have it mixed too strong.  A proper concentration will have no smell and it will not leave an after taste on the surface.  It won’t even stain your clothes if you get splashed.  And bleach is one of the least expensive sanitizers you can use.

As a successful restaurant manager you need to make sure that your restaurant is not only clean, but it is sanitary as well.  Teach your staff to sanitize their areas, then inspect to make sure they are doing it right.