Facilitating A Hygienic Kitchen

Hygiene doesn’t come on a platter, especially in commercial kitchens. A number of elements must interact with each other seamlessly to produce the perfect recipe for a hygienic kitchen, which is a must for ensuring food safety in restaurants as well as guest satisfaction. Out of these multiple factors, two players in this process stand out – the importance of clean utensils and pest control. While cross-contamination through utensils is often neglected, pest infestation is a widely acknowledged and yet a difficult-to-control problem.

Clean Utensils to Reduce Contamination

If you want to reduce the risk of contamination in kitchens, keeping the knives or graters clean is absolutely essential as these cutting equipment can act as transmitters of harmful bacteria from one food item to another.

Produce that contain bacteria would contaminate other items through the continued use of knives or graters because the bacteria would latch on to the utensils and spread to the next item, according to a new study.

Unfortunately, many people are unaware that utensils and other surfaces can contribute to the spread of bacteria, said the study’s lead author Marilyn Erickson, an Associate Professor of Food Science and Technology at the University of Georgia in the US.

“Just knowing that utensils may lead to cross-contamination is important,” Erickson said. “With that knowledge, consumers are then more likely to make sure they wash them in between uses,” she observed.

Erickson has been researching products for the past 10 years. Her past work has mainly focused on the fate of bacteria on produce when they are introduced to plants in the field during farming.

In 2013, she was the co-author of a study looking at the transfer of norovirus and hepatitis A between produce and common kitchen utensils. In that study, she found that cutting and grating increased the number of contaminated produce items when that utensil had first been used to process a contaminated item.