With restrictions being eased around the world, all businesses including restaurants are opening after the long haul. However, people are still wary of public dining and hygiene and sanitation, and these factors remain the top concerns for diners. So, as a restaurant owner, you need to employ the best cleaning practices in your restaurants to ensure your clients can dine carefreely and your business runs smoothly.
With the rapid spread of the coronavirus, cleaning your restaurant is no longer enough! You need to sanitize it thoroughly using several steps and multiple times to ensure zero transmission at your workplace. Regular sanitization with disinfectants is necessary at all surfaces that the food meets and that includes the counter, the utensils, and everything else.
Also Read: What the future holds for the restaurant industry.
We’ve compiled a set of guidelines to help you manage your business safely by utilizing these restaurant cleaning best practices.
1. Social Distancing is the New Norm
Always ensure you follow social distancing forms. You can rearrange the eating arrangement at your restaurant such that it follows strict social distancing measures. As a safety measure, always ensure that your restaurant is not over-crowded. After a huge setback, we understand how important it is to attract more and more customers to get your business up and going. However, remember that overcrowding can increase the risk of infection and drive away potential customers.
Using the inresto Guest and Reserve app can help you handle capacity management so that you can handle this issue seamlessly. Further, provide sanitation and conduct thermal scan facilities for your customers especially at the point of entry.
2. DIY, It’s Easy!
If the DIY approach to restaurant cleaning best practices sounds too much work for you, hire companies offering cleaning services that focus exclusively on a deep-clean sanitization of your workplace. Do your research, talk to people in your circle, and find out the best team of professionals for disinfecting your restaurant. Enquire what cleaning products the company uses and invite them for a discussion. Then, you can discuss your requirements and find out whether they are the best fit for the job.
3. Get the Staff Onboard
Train your entire staff for working in the present pandemic. Your team must follow all safety guidelines to the letter to keep your customers and their selves safe from any risk of transmission. From knowing how to clean your restaurant to maintaining social distance while booking and delivering orders, make every staff member undergo additional training to conduct business safely.
Personal protection equipment, especially the mask must always be worn. With asymptomatic cases becoming more and more common, a mask is the need of the hour to protect your employees from unforeseen risks.
4. Self-Service, Aye Aye!
Eliminate self-service features at your restaurant. You need to avoid situations like buffets where the same utensil is handled by several people as it multiplies the risk of transmission many times. Going digital with your menu is also a good idea as the customers would be able to choose their order digitally on devices and hence manual contact is minimized.
5. Slow and Steady
While employing these restaurant cleaning best practices will provide a safe carefree environment, they will be efficient only if they’re conducted on a regular basis. So, create timetables for disinfecting your restaurant and do it on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis as you increase the extensiveness of the disinfection process.
You can also minimize the items available on tables and disinfect the table and chair between sittings. This way, you are eliminating the scope of the virus right at its origin and making your safety measures much more efficient.
6. Every Surface Matters
Common points of contact like the door handle and cash machine should be disinfected after every use. The surface of our fingertips can pick up the virus easily and spread it to all the surfaces it encounters. Hence, take all possible precautions from your end to employ the restaurant cleaning best practices.
Further, make your customers realize that their safety and good health is your top priority. When customers see the extensive sanitisation regime being religiously followed at your restaurant, they are bound to return as well as recommend people in their social circle to try out your services. Establishing that public confidence and trust in your customers is the best marketing strategy you could employ at this time.
7. Keep the Trash Out
Some other sanitisation measures you should take:
- Make sure that the restrooms are cleaned at regular intervals.
- Provide alcohol-based sanitisation as well as liquid hand soaps in the washrooms.
- Vacuum the floor regularly.
- Take out the trash at fixed intervals.
When you talk about how to clean your restaurant, it is essential to consider all areas and not just the ones food essentially comes in contact with.
8. Hand Wash – The Perfect Precaution
Encourage regular hand wash and sanitisation among your staff and make sure these are regularly re-filled. Install sanitisation points at several places inside your kitchen. Kitchen equipment like the coffee machine, the fryer, the microwave, and the fridge should be continually wiped with either disinfectant sanitiser wipes or with a normal cloth and disinfectant.
9. Good Health = Good Business
Ensure daily temperature and health checks for all your employees. Keep a chart of their health and identify the potential cases. With the season of the flu and cold and cough beckoning, it is essential to ensure that all your employees are in perfect health and not potential carriers of any infectious disease themselves. To keep your customers safe, you should hence focus on keeping your staff safe and healthy primarily.
10. Now, You’re Open for Business!
These simple guidelines will be sufficient to know how to clean your restaurant when you open a business. In the post-pandemic world, adhering to these precautions will create a healthy and secure environment and encourage potential customers to dine at your restaurant without worrying too much.
So, convince your audience that you’re following all safety guidelines to perfection and ease them into a memorable dining experience at your restaurant. Safety and precautions are the primary concerns for potential diners right now and the situation will remain the same for at least a few more months. So, resume business with these guidelines and you’re good to go!
