Dirty Restaurants' Dirty Little Secrets

You can scrub your floors and wipe down your counters, but the dirtiest part of your restaurant is a place you may not think about deep cleaning. Dirty restaurants, and even clean ones, often overlook the most obvious spot where bacteria can pass from customer to customer: the restaurant tabletop, including everything on it. After all, what do your guests come into contact with the most? If the items on your tabletops aren't cleaned properly, they'll be covered in soil and germs in very little time. Once you discover these germy culprits, using the right cleaning methods is the only way to make sure your tabletops are clean.

Condiments

If your restaurant includes salt and pepper shakers, ketchup bottles, hot pepper shakers, and other condiments as standard parts of its place settings, you probably don't clean them every single time a customer uses them. In many places, they only get cleaned when they're refilled, if they ever get cleaned at all. It isn't only dirty restaurants that have problems with germs and bacteria. Even in clean restaurants, a rag and spray bottle are the usual tools used for cleaning these items. Unfortunately, they don't do much more than spread germs around the surface of each object and transfer them from one container to the next.

The best way to remove soil and germs from an object is with the eightfold method. Fold a square microfiber cloth in half, then in half again. Wipe an item. Once that surface of the rag is used, turn it over to the other side to use the clean half to wipe the next item. After these two surfaces are soiled, unfold and refold the cloth so two more clean surfaces are exposed. You can do this four times to expose a total of eight different cleaning surfaces for each rag you use. Kaivac has made this method simple with the SmartTowel. Its distinctive markings make using the correct side simple for your whole crew.

Tabletops

The surface of the table itself can be covered in food soil and in bacteria from customers' hands. If your employees are using a rag and a bucket or bottle of cleaning solution, they're spreading more germs than they're removing. Instead, you need to implement cleaning methods to completely remove the soil and germs from dining tables. Kaivac's KaiFly system allows you to do this quickly and conveniently. Spray cleaning solution over the surface of a microfiber pad, and then use the pad to spread it over the entire table. Wait a moment for the solution to soak in, then use the industrial squeegee to wipe all moisture, soil, and germs from the table surface. You're left with a clean table that's safe for the next set of diners to use.

Menus

The one item that almost every single diner handles is the menu, and virtually none of your customers wash their hands first?or even afterward. Unless you're taking care to keep your menus clean, germs will collect and spread on your menu pages all day long. Break this cycle by using an effective cleaning solution and wiping the front, back, and inner pages with a SmartTowel. You'll remove the germs without transferring them from one menu to the other.

For more information on cleaning your restaurant tabletops and keeping your diners happy and healthy, click here.