Prevent Food-Borne Illnesses With A Kitchen Cleaning Checklist

What Is a Kitchen Cleaning Checklist?

A kitchen cleaning checklist helps you keep the kitchen organized, sanitary, and operational. Areas of particular focus include the floor, surfaces, and appliances, as well as monitoring the hygiene of your staff.

Kitchen cleaning is essential for food safety in the hospitality industry. A cleaning plan will help you avoid contaminating food and spreading viruses and bacteria. In addition, you will need a through kitchen cleaning plan to pass inspections by authorities.

In this article, you can expect:

1. The value of a kitchen cleaning checklist

2. How digital checklists are revolutionizing kitchen cleaning

What Is the Value of a Kitchen Cleaning Checklist?

Restaurants, hotels, delis, and grocery stores should be prepared for random inspections. Poor kitchen hygiene and practices are a threaten worker and consumer safety. The consequence can be fines, poor ratings and, in the worst case, permenant shutdown.

So, daily cleaning of the kitchen is essential for any business. Using a kitchen cleaning checklist will give you the confidence to pass an unannounced health inspection at any time. Below, you’ll find a list of the advantages of keeping a kitchen cleaning schedule:

1. A Better Overview

The bigger the kitchen, the harder it is to have an overview of the entire operation and individual workstations. Use a kitchen cleaning checklist so that you won’t forget a thing. Moreover, a checklist reassures you that you didn’t miss anything, which makes work less stressful.

In general, having a better overview of your tasks makes it easier to coordinate and plan kitchen cleaning. Include a kitchen cleaning schedule in your checklist to plan the cleaning process more precisely.

2. Keep Track of All Critical Areas in Your Kitchen

A kitchen has a lot of nooks and crannies, which makes it harder to keep track of, especially cooking stations that need more attention when cleaning. Create a new page in your kitchen checklist for each area so that you can stay on top of cleaning. The five most crucial areas in every kitchen are:

1. Kitchen Equipment
   

   Clean your kitchen utensils after each use to prevent transmission of bacteria and viruses and cross-contamination of allergens. Kitchen utensils include knives, pots, pans, or other items you use to cook with.

2. Kitchen Floors
   

   Properly clean and sanitize the floor every day before closing the kitchen or after every time something was spilled. That way, you prevent staff from falling as well as the formation of disease-causing bacteria and the attraction of vermin by food residues.

3. Ovens
   

   Clean the ovens daily to avoid build-up and reduce the risk of fires. Remove any grease and food residues using a brush, washcloth, or scraper. To maximize kitchen safety, check and maintain the hood fire suppression system so that it will cut off the gas supply in the case of a fire.

4. Garbage Cans

   Improper garbage disposal can lead to a pest infestation. Keep the area around garbage cans clean to help create a hygienic and safe environment for employees that come into contact with the bins.

5. Walk-in Refrigerators
   

   Walk-in refrigerators are used for different kinds of food. Therefore, it is crucial to keep them clean to prevent contamination. Clean the refrigerators weekly and don’t forget the shelves and walls!

3. Better Personal Hygiene

It is not only the kitchen itself that matters but also the hygiene of the employees. A lack of body care is often a reason for food poisoning. Personal hygiene includes:

• Clean and suitable clothing
• Good hand washing techniques
• Short and clean fingernails
• Gloves and hairnets
• Changing aprons for different food/stations

Create a kitchen cleaning checklist for body care as well, or hang up signs in high-trafficked areas showing proper hygiene practices.

How Modern Technology Helps You With Kitchen Cleaning

As mentioned earlier, checklists make kitchen safety, cleaning, work, and planning much easier. Digital kitchen cleaning checklists have the same effect when ensuring kitchen tasks are done on time and done well.

Lumiform is a powerful mobile inspection and audit app that revolutionizes your kitchen cleaning. Streamline and automate your kitchen cleaning schedule with paperless kitchen cleaning inspections and checklists via smartphone or tablet.

• Get a general overview of everything that happens in the kitchen.
• Kitchen cleaning processes or inspections are completed about 30%-50% faster, depending on the application.
• Easier analysis of all data and faster identification of areas that need more attention.
• Increase the efficiency of your cleaning processes: Resolve incidents up to 4x faster than before through more efficient communication with the team, third parties, and management for faster incident reporting.
• All results, images, and comments are automatically bundled into a digital kitchen cleaning report.
• With Lumiform's flexible checklist builder, you can optimize internal kitchen cleaning processes and inspections at any time. The user-friendly interface guides you through the kitchen cleaning checklist, and no training is required.

To help you get started, we've compiled the best kitchen cleaning checklists. Create your own custom kitchen cleaning checklist by downloading a template for free and customizing it to your needs.