Restaurant Cleaning & The Importance of Clean Restrooms

Posted on November 27, 2018

If you own or manage a restaurant, poor cleanliness and lax hygiene standards are ingredients for failure. Customers don’t want to eat in an unclean dining area or buy food that was made in an unsanitary kitchen. With substandard restaurant cleaning practices, you can expect plenty of one-star reviews and trouble generating repeat business.

In restaurant cleaning, restrooms are one of the biggest problem areas. Restrooms are — unsurprisingly — the least sanitary areas in most restaurants. They’re also the leading cause of cleanliness complaints from restaurant patrons. These complaints, whether expressed or unexpressed, have a big impact on customer behavior, driving patrons to businesses with cleaner facilities.

Why Restrooms Matter in Restaurant Cleaning

Some restaurateurs underestimate the impact of unclean restrooms on their business. Food isn’t prepared in the restroom. It isn’t eaten in the restroom. If your kitchen and dining areas are spotless, why should customers care that your restrooms aren’t sparkling clean?

Setting aside whether customers should care, the fact remains that unclean restrooms are a huge turnoff for diners. This has been confirmed by multiple studies of consumer behaviors.

One survey found that 95% of customers would not return to a restaurant where they had a negative restroom experience. Another survey found that 80% of people would not eat at a restaurant where they’d been told the restrooms were dirty. In perhaps the most damning survey, researchers found that 88% of customers assumed that an unsanitary restroom meant an equally unsanitary kitchen.

Bottom line: Restrooms need to be a priority in your restaurant cleaning plan.

Restroom Cleaning for Restaurants

It’s easy to say that your restaurant needs clean restrooms. It’s a little more difficult to create a cost-effective restaurant cleaning plan that keeps your restrooms as clean and hygienic as they need to be.

That process can be easier with help from a restaurant cleaning service. A professional cleaning service can help you create an effective restroom cleaning schedule, including a detailed checklist of cleaning tasks. More importantly, professional cleaners will have the training and tools to give your bathrooms a deeper, healthier, higher-quality clean.

JAN-PRO® restaurant cleaning services are a great example. Here are a few of the strategies, products, and technologies that we use to ensure a deeper clean in restaurant restrooms:

  • We pay special attention to areas where bacteria pose the biggest risk. These include frequently touched surfaces like faucet handles, door handles, and flush handles, as well as damp, dark areas where bacteria can easily breed.
  • We use microfiber cleaning cloths and mop pads, which are proven to trap upwards of 99% of bacteria when used on hard surfaces. This is roughly three times as effective as cotton cleaning materials.
  • We color-code our microfiber materials based on which rooms they are used in, which eliminates the risk of bacterial cross-contamination from your restrooms to other parts of your restaurant.
  • We equip our cleaners with some of the safest and most effective sanitizers and disinfectants on the market. Cleaners are also trained to maximize coverage when applying these products, reducing the volume of product needed to sanitize/disinfect restroom surfaces.
  • We offer EnviroShield® disinfection and odor removal treatments, a non-toxic and eco-friendly disinfection method that eliminates more than 99.99% of restroom bacteria, while also neutralizing restroom odors.

Learn more about JAN-PRO restaurant cleaning services and request a free consultation by calling 866-355-1064 today!