The Backend Of A Retail Store​

The most important area for considering daily cleaning is a retail store’s back area. Mostly, it contains the storage rooms for grocery, produce, dairy, deli and meat products, and also the bay area for receiving grocery items. These places could be easily contaminated without proper cleaning techniques. Considering cleaning as a cost is a great mistake; not considering daily cleaning of a store’s back rooms leads to spend more money at the future.

Regular cleaning

By regular cleaning, you may keep a cleaning environment. This will make all employees and customers have better health.

Depending on the area, commercial cleaning services should be carefully maintained.

Receiving Area

The place where all products meet together, hence causes cross-contamination. In simple word, cross-contamination is spreading of bacteria from raw meats to produce. If a pallet of meat products received and kept for sometime, juices from the meat will be spilled or oozed out. If the nearby pallet contains vegetables and contact with the meat pallet, the cross-contamination will occur. When the meat juices spilled on a floor for a long time, especially in summer, the germs will ready to spread through the air.

Improperly packed flour or sugar sacks or bags will cause dust. Unswept floor will cause those dust will circulate around the receiving bay. An employee who inhales these dust may exposed to lung diseases.

If there are items stacked for a long period of time, it should be moved out and the area beneath the pallets should be cleaned properly. Without doing so will attract the disease carrying agents such as rodents and cockroaches.

Thus wet cleaning the receiving area at least every other day is important.

Dairy

Believing that all kind of microorganisms could die in the dairy cooler is our ignorance. Some of the microorganisms able to grow or survive at cold temperatures. For instance, a bacterium named Yersinia enterocolitica could survive at the temperature between -1.5o C and 44o C. Raw milk, water, pork and other raw meats are the source of living of these microorganisms.

Uncleaned dairy or meat floors and walls are of suitable places for growing of these germs. Ingesting foods that contaminated by these bacteria or fungus will lead to dangerous foodborne illnesses such as sepsis, diarrhoea, meningitis, dysentery, food poisoning, urinary tract infections, and gastrointestinal infections. Most common mould types love to live in the refrigerator sides and can produce poisonous substances which are known to be potent carcinogens.

Deli & Meat Department

The above mentioned for the dairy is entirely suitable for deli & meat department. However, lack of periodic cleaning & sanitation for this department will lead more severe results than dairy department. Failures in meat department hygiene can cause high financial losses in the long run. Cleaning> is the removal of dirt and organic substances, such as fat and protein particles from surfaces of walls, floors, tools and equipment. Through the cleaning procedures, high numbers of microorganisms (90% and more) present on the mentioned objects will be removed. However, many microorganisms stick very firmly to surfaces, in particular in tiny almost invisible layers of organic materials, so called biofilms, and will not entirely be removed even by profound cleaning but persist and continue multiplying.

Inactivation of those microorganisms requires antimicrobial treatments, carried out in food industries through hot water or steam or through the application of disinfectants. Disinfectants are chemical substances, which kill microorganisms but should not affect human health through hazardous residues and not cause corrosion of equipment. The application of disinfectants is called disinfection. The term sanitation refers to the inactivation of microorganisms through disinfectants, but also includes combating pests such as insects and rodents through chemical substances (insecticides and rodenticides).

The first step in floor and equipment cleaning is to physically remove scrap, i.e. coarse solid particles, with a dry brush or broom and shovel. This is usually referred to as “dry cleaning”. More profound clean-up procedures require water in sufficient quantities. Manual cleaning using brushes or scrapers is widely applied in small-scale operations although labour and time-intensive. A cleaning method commonly used in the meat industries is high pressure cleaning. The pressurized water is applied by high pressure units and special spraying lances. High pressure water is efficient for surface cleaning after dry-cleaning of scrap. It serves for the removal of remaining small solid parts, blood and dirt from the entire floors and walls of processing sections as well as for the removal of meat and fat particles and layers of protein from tools and equipment. As hot water has a much better cleaning effect than cold water, hot water should be available for this purpose. (WHO)

What kind of service you may need at the back end of a retail store?