Home / National Food Safety Month Week 2: Clean and sanitize right!
ServSafe delivers six tips and teaching activities to reinforce ways to correctly clean and sanitize your restaurants.
Food can easily be contaminated if you don’t keep your facility and equipment clean and sanitized. While cleaning removes food and other dirt from a surface, sanitizing reduces the number of pathogens on a surface to safe levels.
Check out these tips for cleaning and sanitizing the right way:
Make sure you mix sanitizers to the right concentration. Sanitizer solution is a mixture of sanitizer and water. The concentration of the mix — the amount of sanitizer to water — is critical. Too little sanitizer and it won’t be effective in reducing pathogens. Too much, and the solution can be unsafe.
Surfaces that don’t come in contact with food only need to be cleaned and rinsed to prevent dirt from building up. But any surface that touches food has to be cleaned, rinsed, sanitized and left to air-dry. Here’s how:
All food-contact surfaces need to be cleaned and sanitized at these times:
Never use cloths that are meant for wiping food spills for any other purpose.
Only use chemicals that are approved for use in a foodservice operation.
Always cover or remove items that could become contaminated before using chemicals.
After using chemicals, make sure to clean and sanitize equipment and utensils.
When transferring chemicals to a new working container, label the new container with the common name of the chemical.
Store chemicals separately from food and equipment by either:
Pathogens can move around easily, spreading from food or unwashed hands to prep areas, equipment, utensils, and other food. But you can prevent it.
Most foodborne illness happens because TCS food has been time-temperature abused.
Guests want to know restaurants are being extra careful when preparing food and keeping the kitchen clean and sanitized during the pandemic.