Keeping Commercial Ovens Clean Essential to Creating Good Quality Food

Keeping commercial ovens clean and shiny is perhaps the most effective and easiest way to ensure that a restaurant or other food-based business maintains high-quality food standards. Taking care of this cleaning task may also impact the bottom line is ways that many business owners have never even anticipated.

Consider that keeping ovens clean may help:

• Increase energy efficiency. Without grime coating the inside of the oven, this necessary kitchen appliance can work better by distributing heat evenly.

• Boost food service times. If the inside of the oven is bright and shiny, it is simple to take a peek at the product inside without opening up the door and allowing heat to escape. This may reduce cooking times and save food from being burned or over-cooked.

• Spot any potential problems with the equipment early on. With a clean oven, it is simple to determine where any problematic issues started and when they began.

• Stop burnt smells from permeating throughout the building. It is never acceptable to have customers wondering if the kitchen is burning down just because a bit of food residue is burning off inside the oven.

• Reduce potential fire hazards. A build-up of grease inside the oven can create a fire hazard.

• Inspire employees to keep all areas of the business clean – even those not accessible to the general public.

It sounds pretty simple to take care of, but there is time and technique involved. It’s not easy to find an hour or two to shut down a commercial oven when the dining room is full. In addition, cleaning the oven is a messy, sometimes torturous task that employees may find all too easy to skip on a regular basis.

Properly train staff members. Start by reading the oven’s owner manual or contacting the manufacturer for cleaning tips. Every commercial oven is different and therefore so is the cleaning process. Once the proper cleaning technique has been identified, properly train staff members so they can promptly and properly clean the oven.

Insist that the oven is cleaned on a regular basis. It may sound like a no-brainer, but the more regularly an oven is cleaned, the easier that level of cleanliness is to maintain. While employees may be overwhelmed at tackling an oven that hasn’t been deep cleaned in at least two years because the chore seems impossible, one that was just wiped clean last week doesn’t seem so bad.

Get the right cleaner for the job. There are many different types of oven cleaning products on the market, so you want to be sure to stock the janitorial closet with the right cleanser.

The Web site www.worldwidejanitor.com carries a complete line of wholesale commercial and industrial cleansers from the Snee Chemical Company that are formulated for commercial ovens. Superior Oven Cleaner, for example, is a ready-to-use product that effortlessly removes baked-on grease from ovens. It also works on hard-to-clean grills.

Safety first. Make sure employees have access to safety equipment when cleaning the oven. Cleaner fumes and chemicals may expose employees to potential danger, so provide them with cleaning masks and gloves to avoid any hazardous contact.

Don’t forget the oven door. Many commercial ovens have a small glass window that allows cooks to take a peek at the food cooking without actually opening the oven door. While this is a convenient feature, the door can present a separate cleaning challenge.

Treat this area with either a degreaser or window cleaning product, but do not use any harsh abrasives, such as a steel wool pad, that can scratch the surface.