Nobody wants to eat a meal in a dirty and unhygienic restaurant. Whether you’re running a fast-casual eatery or Michelin-starred bistro, subpar cleaning practices can make or break your business.
While most restaurateurs understand the importance of cleaning and hygiene, some still think of cleaning as a mid-level or low-level priority. In most cases, that’s because they haven’t seen the real data on subpar restaurant cleaning.
Consumers Don’t Compromise on Cleanliness
It’s easy to convince yourself that your customers aren’t that concerned with cleanliness. After all, they’re coming to your restaurant to have a great meal. If the floors at your entrance are a little bit stained, or your bathrooms aren’t as spotless as they could be, who cares? That’s not where you make your food, and it’s not where your customers eat it.
Except customers do care. And they care a lot. One survey found that 75% of customers refused to eat at a restaurant with dirty bathrooms, 74% wouldn’t eat at one with dirty tables, and 68% wouldn’t eat at one with unclean floors.
Worse yet, if customers spot dirty areas in your restaurant, they assume other areas are just as unclean. In the same survey, 86% of consumers said that if a restaurant’s bathroom wasn’t clean, they assumed that the kitchen wasn’t clean either.
Subpar Cleanings Lead to Subpar Reviews
Before Yelp, it took more than one customer’s bad experience to ruin a restaurant. Things are different now. If the wrong person walks into your restaurant on the wrong day — like the day your new bartender forgot to clean the restrooms — your online reputation can quickly take a beating.
Bad online reviews don’t just damage reputations. They also put the hurt on restaurants’ bottom lines. Researchers have found that each star you gain or lose on Yelp is correlated with a 5% to 9% increase or decrease in restaurant revenues.
If your restaurant has subpar cleaning issues, the problem gets even worse. Studies have found a strong correlation between a restaurant’s hygiene levels and the language used by customers in reviews. A 2016 study by UC Irvine found that simply by analyzing Yelp reviews in the San Francisco Bay Area, researchers could predict which restaurants were about to earn a serious health code violation with 78% accuracy.
Should You Hire Restaurant Cleaning Services?
Given the above information, it should come as no surprise that restaurant cleaning has become a major priority in the food services industry. While some major chains and many smaller restaurants continue to depend on in-house staff to clean their premises, others have started turning to professional restaurant cleaning services.
Whether or not you should hire a restaurant cleaning service will depend on your budget, your staff, your facility, and your business model, but it’s a decision you shouldn’t take lightly. So, before you hand a mop and bucket over to your employees, make sure that you understand what restaurant cleaning services have to offer, and don’t underestimate their impact on your reputation.
Request a FREE restaurant cleaning estimate today by calling JAN-PRO at 866-355-1064!