Environmental Health and Catering from Home
Running a catering business from home….
What you need to know:
The best place to start prior to reading this article is to either watch or to read the vlog/blog series on this website on the Environmental Health Series which will of course give you a good grounding in what the requirements are across all food catering businesses.
The series discussed five areas:
- Part 1 - Colour coding each area
- Part 2 - The correct way in which to wash and sanitise your dishes
- Part 3 - Sanitising effectively
- Part 4 - Appropriate hand washing, hand wash sinks & soaps and cross contamination
- Part 5 - Relationships and choosing the right hygiene partner
One of our readers has approached me as she is running a catering business from her own domestic kitchen. She has asked me to expand on the environmental health guidelines and to really encompass guidance and advice and some tips for those people that are running a catering business from home.
When you are running your catering business from home, it is important that you are of course adhering to all of the guidelines and making sure that you are providing safe and uncontaminated food. You need to ensure that your dishes are being sanitised appropriately with an accredited chemical and that all of the other guidelines are being adhered to which is best practice and will help you to create and solidify your relationship with your environmental health officer.
When you are creating your kitchen and buying your utensils, you need to make sure you’re using utensils that won’t corrode; stainless steel is always good! Make sure that every food is labelled appropriately that you have a specific colour for your kitchen areas & that you are using the correct bactericidal detergent for dishwashing and dish sanitisation. It is equally important to make sure that you are using a BS EN 1276 product (I’ve linked our Cleaner Sanitiser) for sanitisation. BS EN 1276 accreditation basically means that your chemical has been tested to see how much bacteria it eradicates from a hard surface and it has met the criteria and eradicates 99.999% of bacteria.
The reason for writing this blog is because one of our followers contacted me and asked me about dishwashing and in particular about hand washing in a small catering business that she runs from home.
She was advised by environmental health to put a basin of hot water beside her sink so that she could wash her hands. She was left scratching her head about this advice because she thought (quite sensibly) that it would actually be better to wash your hands under fresh running water.
Environmental Health do advocate the use of fresh running water, and several sinks for several uses in commercial kitchens so I understand why she is confused.
In my guidance in the environmental health series, I advocated the use of a separate handwashing sink. When you’re running a catering business from a domestic kitchen it is harder/expensive to install a separate handwashing sink.
In a normal commercial kitchen, the food standards agency do advocate use of a double sink, one sink to wash dishes with a washing up liquid to remove the soil and clean the dishes, and the other sink prepared with a sanitiser specifically for dishes (which you would use for any dish that isn’t going through the dishwasher to be thermally disinfected). When you have a double sink you fill up the first sink with hot water and some sort of a washing up liquid so that you are able to wash the dishes and get all of the organic matter off them rinse them under the tap and then you would use the next sink with a specifically diluted amount of bactericidal detergent in a specific amount of water.
When using a sanitiser specifically for dishes, you will be using a Bactericidal Detergent, and you need to make sure this is diluted exactly as the instructions dictate. This means having to measure the amount of water, to ensure you are diluting the chemical in the right quantities –the sanitisation properties are at the optimum level to kill all foodborne bacteria.
That being said there is no requirement to use the bactericidal detergent when you are using your dishwasher for everything. By everything I mean all pots and pans; everything that you are using to prepare and cook the food with because everything that touches the food needs to be in a sanitised state. If you have a set of very expensive knives that you don’t want to put through the dishwasher, if you have a large pot that can’t fit in your dishwasher, this is where your separate sink with bactericidal detergent comes in to play.
In commercial kitchens there is a requirement for a handwashing sink but in most domestic environments a handwashing sink is not going to be present in addition to the dishwashing sink. So environmental health often advocate the use of a basin filled with warm water when you are running a catering business from home. The instructions our follower received from her EHO (Environmental Health Officer) was to get a plastic basin fill it with hot water put a bottle of antibacterial soap next to it and use this to wash your hands.
Now most people would assume that it might be better to be washing your hands under the running water, and there is some logic to this however if you are touching raw meat and your sink is full of soapy water ready for washing dishes then the bacteria that’s on your hands is going to be running into your dish washing sink. Environmental Health have altered the guidelines to make it easier whilst being hygiene focused for catering businesses run from home, so use these guidelines.
Environmental Health need to make all of the guidelines easy for everyone to follow, and they need to make them applicable to all kinds of environments, so the guidelines must be quite broad brush and appropriate for businesses making cakes and businesses making meat pies – the hygiene implications of both of these businesses are very different.
If you would like us to answer any question specifically, message us at sales@astralhygiene.co.uk and we might blog/vlog about it!
