Jake Hibbett faced a cleaning challenge faced by many restaurants. As assistant Manager of Buffalo Wings & Rings in Greendale, Ind., he needed to create a clean and inviting environment for diners. However, the combination of the dining room’s wood-look tile floor and the mops used to clean it created an eyesore. He needed a new solution for cleaning floors.
“The front-of-house floors were very hard to get clean,” said Hibbett. “I would come in every morning and see footprints on the floor. The back of house was very greasy and we would sometimes use the same mop to clean the front of house. It made the whole place greasy. We had tried different chemicals, different tools. Nothing was improving the visible cleanliness.”
In the ongoing search for ways to improve maintaining the 6,000-square-foot restaurant, Buffalo Wings & Rings invited a rep from Kaivac to demo their floor care technology as an alternative to mopping. The rep took the Kaivac Dispense-and-Vac to the cream-colored tiles at the host stand in the front of the house.
“We always thought that it was black grout between those tiles,” said Hibbett. “When they demoed the Kaivac machine for us, the grout turned out to be white. That blew us away. The black stain came up with ease. He put the solution down, let it dwell, and after that, it just came right up.”
Putting Dispense-and-Vac to Work
The staff immediately decided to put the Dispense-and-Vac into operation. They plugged it into their regular routine, in the morning tackling the kitchen and one side of the dining room and cleaning the other half of the dining room after closing.
“The Kaivac machine cleans the same space about 10 minutes faster than a mop,” said Hibbett. “At night we used to have two servers close. One went around with a deck brush to scrub, the next would mop. Now we only need one closer to man the Dispense-and-Vac. When I get to work in the morning, the floors look new everyday. The Kaivac machine completely solved the problem.”
The choice to stop the mop and switch to a new floor cleaning solution was initiated due to the problem with the dining room floors. After the switch, Hibbett found new ways to apply the machine in the back-of-house.
The Dispense-and-Vac allows for modular customization based on the task at hand. First Hibbett added a smaller squeegee for easier maneuvering behind the lines of kitchen equipment. Then he purchased a pressure-washer box to convert it to a Spray-and-Vac and discovered a multitude of uses for it: cleaning under shelving with a six-inch clearance and cleaning the stainless steel above the dishwashing station in addition to baseboards, pipes, and drains.
“We’re simultaneously saving time and cleaning more,” said Hibbett.
