Step up food hygiene checks
Solid surface specialist Tristone is urging the government to do more to root out bad hygiene in the restaurant trade, following recent research which show that inspections have fallen by 15 per cent since 2003.
Tristone has already thrown its weight behind calls for the display of hygiene ratings to be made compulsory and are asking government to do more to ensure that poor hygiene is stamped out entirely.
The total number of inspections has fallen from 307,526 in 2003-04 to 260,765 in 2014-15, amounting to almost 50,000 less inspections, something which is a ‘growing concern’ for the Food Standards Agency watchdog.
“I was very disappointed to read about this new research,” said Howard Noh, MD of Tristone. “Hygiene in restaurants is not an area we can afford to make cuts in – it’s people’s health and potentially even their lives we are talking about here. The government should be increasing staff in this area, not making cuts.”
There are numerous reasons that a restaurant might score a poor food hygiene rating. These can be as simple as storing and labelling food correctly, but can also extend to complex issues like cleanliness. For business operating on tight margins, corners might be cut when it comes to cleaning, to save on staff hours.
A few simple steps both from government and restaurants themselves can seriously improve hygiene in restaurants, Howard added. happening.
“Certainly, when it comes to worktops, many businesses are making simple mistakes, such as using porous surfaces, moulded together by grouting. When it comes to keeping a clean kitchen, these are two of the main issues. Grout is notorious as a site of bacterial build-up, and porous surface can take hours to scrub clean properly. By bringing in a surface such as Tristone, kitchens can make cleaning, and therefore hygiene so much easier.”
