Considering a commercial kitchen has fire hazards, electrical hazards, and all sorts of other dangers, safety is critical for the health of all employees. But what safety features does your commercial kitchen need?
Electrical Safety Risk Assessment
As the name suggests, this is where an independent company visits your premises to check potential electrical hazards and working practices. With the right provider, an electrical safety risk assessment helps you to identify hazards and keep the kitchen as safe as possible for all.
Depending on the hazard, the service will recommend either eliminating, substituting, or isolating the risk. Instead of just pointing out hazards, the very best companies also suggest solutions to keep the premises safe.
Test and Tag
In every commercial kitchen, you’ll find machines and equipment used daily. Whether a microwave, a toaster, or an electric fryer, they’re relied upon for many hours every single day. Therefore, they’re not immune to wear and tear. The best way to ensure that your electrical equipment is in a good condition is to have a service like Jim’s test and tag services in Sydney test and tag it.
What does this mean? A company will come in to test all electrical equipment and ensure that it meets OH&S regulations. With this, you’re not only keeping workers safe but you’re also meeting the necessary guidelines (and avoiding penalties and other punishments!). The company will test all electrical equipment and ensure that it’s not likely to have any major faults in the coming weeks and months.
If it’s safe, it will be tagged as such. If there’s a problem, you can either get it repaired or replaced before it has a chance to injure an employee. With this in mind, it’s a win-win scenario for all restaurants, cafes, and food establishments.
Training
Often, businesses spend lots of time and money on safety measures when they don’t realise that training has one of the biggest benefits of all. You could have all the safety measures in the world, but this counts for nothing if employees don’t have the correct training. Employees should know how to use all equipment safely, how to use the safety measures that you implement, and how to react in certain situations.
For example, training employees how to shut the main gas supply off could not only save a kitchen fire but also many lives.
Food Hygiene
As well as the kitchen itself, you need to monitor the food leaving the kitchen and sitting in front of customers. Food hygiene has grown more prominent in recent years, and this is to prevent unsafe storage, cooking, and cleaning practices. Unfortunately, this only leads to one thing – customers with food poisoning and other bad experiences.
Employees should know how to label and store food, how to prevent cross-contamination, and how to disinfect areas properly.
Infrastructure
Elsewhere, any commercial kitchen needs the basic infrastructure in place to stay safe. This includes:
- Waste disposal practices
- Ventilation
- Gas safety
- Fire safety
- Refrigeration
- Equipment maintenance
All kitchens need ventilation, and no kitchen should ever have black waste bags just building up in the corner. Instead, you should have a waste disposal system to ensure it leaves the kitchen quickly. Likewise, you should have systems in place in the event of a fire.
With this, you have five important safety features for all commercial kitchens. This includes an electrical safety risk assessment, test and tag, training, food hygiene, and infrastructure. If you follow these tips, you’ll adhere to all government guidelines and keep all employees (and customers!) safe.
