Where there's muck

There's one thing likely to close a restaurant faster than poor trading, and that's bad hygiene. The bank manager may give an extension on debt to allow trading to continue, but the environmental health officer has no mercy. If the cleanliness of the kitchen presents a serious public health risk, the front door is forcibly closed.

Horror stories of dirty kitchens make good newspaper headlines, but restaurants from hell are very rare. Most kitchen staff are aware of good cleaning practice and the business risk you run by ignoring it.

Brian Stringfellow, operations manager for Jeyes Professional, is adamant that standards of cleanliness in restaurant kitchens has improved tremendously in the last 10 years. "We regularly do on-site visits to plan a cleaning routine throughout the kitchen and it's very rare anyone comes back into the office and says ‘guess what I've just seen'," he says. "Chefs are very aware that cleaning the kitchen at the end of the shift is important."

Cleaning chemicals represent a high cash flow for both caterers and suppliers, which inevitably leads to price competitiveness. The problem for the big players such as Jeyes Professional, Stringfellow explains, is that cleaning chemicals are often seen as a commodity purchase like sugar and flour, where only the price dictates the choice.

"The active ingredients cost the money, not the bulking agents. Anyone can make a cheap detergent, but all that happens is that you have to use more to achieve a proper result or cleaning standards slip," he says.

Pub operator Greene King has annual standards awards across its estate of 571 managed pubs and 1,122 tenanted and leased pubs. This year's winner of the award reflecting all standards of cleanliness, including kitchen and washroom cleaning, was the Stag in Redhill, Surrey. Managers Nick Hopkins and Tracey Bailey employ a local cleaner for both kitchen and washroom areas who knows what cleaning products to use and the standards the pub expects.

There is a general clean-down across the pub every day, but in addition an extra area gets a specific deep-clean, so that over a cycle all areas of the pub get a daily clean and an intensive clean.

Kitchen-cleaning at the Stag is the responsibility of the kitchen manager and that routine is similar, with a mix of daily cleaning and a daily focus on one particular area. Hopkins says on areas like ovens where there's a high incidence of burned-on food debris, to neglect cleaning just makes the job more difficult. Another problem is the ceiling, which can quickly get a build-up of scum from the grease and smoke coming from fryers and ovens.

Greene King has a comprehensive trading arrangement with Jeyes Professional for cleaning agents to supply a survey of needs, the products, dispensers, training and wall posters for kitchens which tell managers the cleaning routines expected and how to perform them.

One of the newer developments in cleaning products for the professional kitchen has been the introduction of colour-coded cloths. Just as colour-coded chopping boards and knives are now in widespread use, single-use cleaning cloths contribute to a high standard of kitchen cleanliness.

Kimberly-Clark has developed four cleaning cloth colours to segregate jobs - blue, green, red and yellow. The purpose is so cleaning staff recognise that different colours are for different cleaning jobs, thereby reducing the risk of cross-contamination. For example, blue cloths are used for hard table-top wipe-down in the restaurant, red cloths for wiping surfaces on which raw meat has been used, green cloths where vegetables have been prepared and yellow where fish has been handled.

While every kitchen should have high standards of cleanliness, the danger is much worse in hospital kitchens, whose customers are often very young or very old and vulnerable to food bugs.

The kitchens at Hillingdon Hospital in Uxbridge, Middlesex, have until recently used generic and own-brand cleaning products, mainly for cost reasons. Medirest, which runs the catering and cleaning at Hillingdon, has now switched to familiar, branded products to reassure patients. After talks with P&G Professional, Hillingdon decided also to switch to branded products in the kitchen. As well as demonstrating to the 20 dedicated kitchen cleaning staff that quality cleaning products were now to be used, the hope was that any higher cost would be offset by better results and less cleaning chemical being needed for a task.

"The kitchen-cleaning teams play a vital role in maintaining a safe, infection-free environment and it's essential they have the best products and methods," says Karen Waring, Medirest operations director.

The trial included equipping the staff with automatic dosing dispensers to prevent too much cleaning agent being dispensed, pushing up costs, or too little, leading to poorer standards. Like most other big companies, P&G Professional did free on-site training in the new chemicals.

The results have been impressive, cutting down the time spent on some tasks by half. An oven cleaner dispensed from spray guns reduced cleaning time for the hospital's bank of ovens from three hours to one-and-a-half hours.

Having removed the grease, bugs and grime from a busy shift of cooking, disposal of the debris is no longer as simple as taking the plug out of the sink and emptying a bucket. While discharging cooking oil into sewers has been under attack for some years for the sewer pest menace it can cause, greasy water can also get caterers into trouble. And it's not just a ticking-off they risk. A restaurant can be heavily fined for causing a blocked municipal drain by discharging waste cooking oil and greasy water into the sewerage system. The problem can be tackled by fitting a dewatering unit or a grease separator before dirty waste water is put into the sewerage system.

The water taken from waste can be safely discharged into the sewerage system while the grease-laden food debris can be compacted and disposed of through landfill. Mechanical grease separators perform a similar job, removing heavy grease from water.

Fat builds up on drains till it blocks them, disrupting business, creating hygiene issues and costing money to clear. While regular dosing with strong chemicals is effective, it's increasingly being seen as environmentally unfriendly. The alternative is bacterial digestion of grease. Regular starter cultures of bacteria, automatically dosed into the drain, eat the fat in order to grow and multiply.

More than 300 Pizza Express restaurants use a system from Metro Rod. John Bailey, restaurant maintenance manager, says the biological route to keeping drains clean and sweet hasn't just solved the problem, but saves money overall.

Tips for keeping a kitchen clean

• Clean as you go is a good working practice for chefs. This helps prevent cross-contamination during a busy service when a knife or board may be accidentally used for raw then fresh food.
• Sanitise regularly. Use good quality hand-spray sanitisers, which can be taint-free, if required for hard-surface restaurant tables or kitchen work surfaces on which food is prepared. Work surfaces can be wiped throughout service as well as when the shift ends.
• Disposable cleaning cloths are the safest route, and colour-coding helps staffs avoid cross-contamination.
• Cheap cleaning agents usually contain less active agent, so more has to be used.
• Never mix cleaning chemicals in a bucket in a bid to make a general purpose cleaner. Certain chemicals can cause a harmful reaction if they're inhaled or touch the skin.

GREASE IS THE WORD

Kitchen ventilation is now common in kitchens and makes a contribution to keeping the kitchen clean by drawing out grease particles from the air so they don't land on walls and floors. The downside is that the grease doesn't disappear. Much of it collects on the filter baffles or the inside of the ducting, which can cause a fire risk if left to build up.

One of the most common causes of commercial kitchen fires is sudden combustion of grease-laden air in the extraction system. Ross Smith, a director of Bright Hygiene, spells out the danger: "A poorly cleaned extraction system is a fuel-loaded cell above a heat source. You don't get a much worse fire hazard than that."

It's not just the disruption to business that comes with a fire in a dirty ventilation duct. Most insurance companies will want to see written evidence that the correct cleaning routine has been carried out before they will pay out on claims.

Martin Turner, operations manager at the extract ventilation division of Indepth Hygiene Services, says insurance companies now issue certificates and take "before" and "after" photographs with every ductwork clean.

There may be months between recommended cleaning at a restaurant where little frying is carried out, while a busy fast-food operation could need cleaning as often as once a fortnight. It's a job for a specialist ductwork-cleaning company which will assess the frequency needed.