21

Aug

How To Prepare For Your Commercial Kitchen Health Inspection?

If you have a restaurant or any food business, then kitchen health inspections are really important to pass if you don’t want to your restaurant to be fined or closed. Moreover, a failed health inspection makes it hard for people to trust your food service. So, if you want to pass the inspection of your commercial kitchen, you need to stay on top of your game. Educate your staff, ensure proper hygiene, maintain the equipment with the help of commercial kitchen appliance repair services, and take care of many other things. Let’s know them more in detail.

Check The Hand Washing Station

First things first, you need to ensure that your hand washing station is clean and up to the standard of the food health and safety code. If the sinks aren’t clean, then how can you expect to pass the inspection with flying colors? So, always make sure that before an inspection and regularly, there is a clean up of the sink and you also want to check for problems associated with the sink, like clogged drains, absence of soap or sanitizer, and the proper working of the faucet.

Also, while you’re at it, make sure that the water temperature is also interchangeable. All of these things are going to ensure that your hand washing station ticks all of the boxes and there won’t be any issues regarding the safety health code when the kitchen is inspected for health and safety measures.

Is There Sanitation?

Hand washing is one thing, but you also need to have different hand sanitation stations, so that chefs, workers, and even servers can use it to clean their hands on the go.

Sometimes, washing hands with water can take a long time, so you’ll need to have these hand sanitation points all over the kitchen, especially near the entrance so that the workers coming in and out of the kitchen can clean their hands before handling food for the patrons. This is an amazing health inspection addition and you will get brownie points for that.

Is There Proper Cleanup?

The next order of importance involves the whole cleanliness of the space. You need to ensure that your kitchen, the floors, and also the workstation have been cleaned after every round of heavy workload. You don’t want to start working in a kitchen that is dirty or hasn’t been wiped down, because there can be a danger of contamination and you don’t want that.

Therefore, always make sure that your kitchen is squeaky clean, and that shouldn’t just be before an inspection. Try to make it a regular habit and you’ll see that the food will be more sanitary and everyone will be happy with the services.

Are The Workstations Clean?

The next important bit to go over is the very place where the food is prepped. You want to ensure that the working counters and stations are clean and they are being regularly wiped down whenever you are ready to make new dishes.

This is important to do because this is the place where food comes into contact with the kitchen surface and you don’t want anything to get contaminated at the end of the day. Make sure that your countertops are clean and that you’re using food-safe cleaners to wipe your countertops down.

Is Your Staff Following All Safety Codes?

This is also really important because, during a commercial kitchen health inspection, the team doesn’t only go through the kitchen, but they also look at different workers and how they’re following the codes laid out by authorities. Are they dressed cleanly? Are they wearing gloves while preparing the food? Are they keeping their mouths and heads covered at all times?

These are just some of the things that the team goes through, so you need to make sure that your staff and waiters are following all orders to the T.

Is The Food Prepared In Sanitary Conditions?

This is something that a lot of restaurants can overlook but you don’t want to if you want everything to go smoothly in a food inspection. If the food is being prepared in unsanitary conditions, then that’s going to give you a bad rating as far as the health and food safety code is concerned.

So, you want to ensure that you’re making and preparing all of the food on clean surfaces and you’re cleaning the workstations, pots, stoves, and ovens regularly, if not a few times a day, to get everything looking spotless and to prevent foodborne illness.

Check The Trash

You don’t want trash, especially perishable trash, sitting around in the kitchen where you’re preparing food. Throwing out trash after every work day is crucial because you don’t want the kitchen to smell bad, especially when you’re preparing food in the same place. So, always make it a habit to check the trash and empty it, as soon as it fills up.

If there is wet and a lot of soiled garbage in the trash, then it’s better if you throw it out before the day ends, otherwise, the smell will waft around the whole kitchen and if you have poor ventilation, then this can turn into a serious problem.

Follow The Rules

When having a commercial food business, there are certain rules and regulations you need to follow. This is different for different restaurants, but you want to ensure that the temperature of the fridges and freezers are set at a certain point.

You also want to ensure that the thermostat of the kitchen is standard to the rules and you also want to know the different working capacities of different workers in the kitchen. This is going to ensure that the inspection goes smoothly and nothing bad happens. If you follow the rules, then you’re good to go.

Have A Checklist

Maintaining a kitchen and its equipment for a food inspection can be a tough task and there are a lot of small things that can slip through the cracks if you don’t pay attention. This is why making a list of things that you need to go over before an inspection is important.

This is going to ensure that you’ve got everything down and you’re not forgetting about the different tasks. Once you’re going through the to-do list, you can even add more things to check as you go and you’ll get done in no time.

Perform A Self-Inspection

Commercial kitchen inspections are done on either a monthly basis or once every couple of months. However, you don’t want to wait around for the team to show up and do the inspection.

Since it’s your kitchen and you are committed to delivering amazing and sanitary food, you need to ensure that you’re doing some sort of regular self-inspections as well. Checking the equipment, making sure that everything is clean, and so on, will only promise better quality and service from your side.

Conclusion

Commercial kitchen health inspections are unannounced so you must make sure that you and your staff are following the hygiene and cleanliness standards set by the FDA. Moreover, your equipment must be maintained by professional commercial appliances repair Springfield technicians to avoid any hazards and food safety violations. Good luck!