One of the most important parts of running any kind of kitchen is ensuring that all your appliances and areas are clean and devoid of filth. With all these meats, dairy products and other food fragments littering the place, it is all too easy for bacteria to find good places to build up and breed in. Keeping your kitchen clean is essential to prevent this, and your food cold storage is no exception. After all, your freezers and iceboxes are where most of your food is stored, and contamination of your storage means contamination of your food.
Remember each cold storage unit is different from the other. Make sure you check with your systems’ specifications before you clean them. Provided is a generalised guide to cold stores hygiene.
Keeping your cold stores clean
So how should one keep their cold storage clean? Ideally your freezers and whatnot should be cleaned at least once every 2-3 months, although if you can afford to do it more frequently it doesn’t hurt at all. Before you begin to clean, remove all food from your stores. Any that is getting towards its sell by date you should consider disposing of, while fresher foodstuffs can be stored in an auxiliary freezer. Then shut off the freezer and allow any ice inside to melt away, leaving your cold stores completely bare.
Start off by scrubbing down the area with warm soapy water, starting from the top and working your way down from the ceiling, to the walls and to the floor. Focus in particular on any areas where bare food may have come into contact with a surface, especially meat. Scrub thoroughly until every square inch has been cleaned, then wipe it all down with a clean towel. This should remove the worst of grime and excess bacteria from the unit. Once all that has been done, go over the freezer again with a good disinfectant or anti-bacterial cleaning solution. This will kill off the rest of any bacteria that may have been colonising your freezer.
As this is ongoing, you should also check the working parts of your freezers, for example by removing any build up of lint from the unit’s vents or workings.
Once the cold storage is clean, you may activate it once more and return any food stuffs you wish to keep in storage. For further information about cold storage, or for an extensive array of cold stores units for a wide variety of businesses, get in touch with us today on 1890 929 824 or fill out a enquiry form with your requiements.
