In this day and age with high turnover rates, busy restaurants, and people moving so quickly, it’s easy for things to fall through the cracks. When you think about regular checklists, like restaurant sanitation, it’s not hard to see how a team might do only what’s highly visible and forget or not make time for some other tasks.
Of course, everyone's going to be sweeping or mopping the floor, cleaning the toilets, things like that. However, here are a few things your restaurant sanitation checklist might be missing.
Most times, people don't switch out the soap nozzle, they'll just refill it. This is a problem because people can transmit bacteria to the dispenser when getting the soap.
Just imagine you're washing your hands in the kitchen or bathroom. How many other people have done the same thing? How often is that nozzle cleaned?
Hopefully, you have a motion-detected dispenser to limit contact and contamination. However, even those need to be cleaned regularly.
There have been numerous studies that have outlined how hairdryers aren't hygienic. They suck up the bacteria in the air and off the floor, shoot them out into the hands, and also the buttons and the air exhaust can be touched by people, thus dirtying them up even more.
A good alternative, though not environmentally friendly, are paper towels because it offers everyone a chance to clean their hands with a fresh towel. They don't need to worry about touching anything that anyone else has been touching or getting blown on.
If you are using air dryers, make sure to clean the dispensers as often as possible!
Isn’t it awesome when restaurants have the contraption at the bottom of the door so you can open it with your foot? Obviously door handles are on the list to be sanitized regularly throughout the day, but you can limit the spread of germs by letting people use the bathroom without having to touch anything with their hands.
Another alternative is to keep a trash can right next to the door so people can open it with a paper towel that they got from an automatic motion detected dispenser and throw that away.
The common thread in this checklist is to limit as much as possible things that people touch with their hands. It’s something we’re all conscious of now with COVID-19 going on, but it’s easy to see why restaurants are a hotspot for this kind of activity. The more you limit hand contact, the better!