When you open a new restaurant, you are rushed off your feet with hundreds of competing responsibilities, and your main focus is bound to be on the food and the customer experience. You should always remember, however, that without adequate sanitation and hygiene, you will have no restaurant to speak of. To make sure that you don't compromise your cooking ability with poor hygiene, here are some things about restaurant hygiene practice that you should keep at the front of your mind.

Ensure that every cook is trained in food safety. It is actually a legal requirement that anybody working with food in Australia has food safety certification, but if they trained as a cook ten years ago, it's important that they still understand the principles and practices of restaurant hygiene. For this reason, it's well worth implementing your own health and safety training program for new hires. This can cover things like surface and floor sanitisation, cleaning of appliances, and the handling of different food groups like raw meat.

Clean every surface. When food comes into contact with any surface, bacteria will start to form. This is why it's important to have sanitation processes in place and that everybody knows their individual responsibilities. All this takes is a simple timetable. Cleaning of surfaces should not simply happen at the beginning and end of the day – it will also need to happen when a surface is used to prepare meat and then vegetables. If you have the space, it's a better idea to have a surface that is dedicated to meat and another dedicated to non-meat, and the same applies to refrigerators. With floor cleaning, the floor should be mopped at the end of the day. This is because wet floors can cause serious accidents. If there is a spill in the day that needs to be mopped, make sure you have a "Wet Floor" sign handy.

Invest in a professional cleaning service. There is so much to clean in a kitchen and restaurant space that you'll need to lean on assistance from in-house staff as well as a commercial cleaning service that has experience with restaurants. While your kitchen staff should be able to store food and sanitise surfaces effectively, the cleaning professionals will be able to provide a deeper clean to things like industrial ovens. They can also get to hidden places, such as underneath cookers or around trash cans that might otherwise be ignored. These areas can be breeding grounds for bacteria, and they can also attract vermin, which spread disease. 

For more information about keeping your restaurant clean and up to standards, contact local commercial cleaning services.