One of the biggest reasons that there are health standards in place at every restaurant is the knowledge that not all of the food that we eat is safe. When health standards slide just a little bit, outbreaks of salmonella, like the one at Tarheel Q, can happen.
Every surface of the restaurant must be cleaned, including all of the restaurant equipment which is in the building. That means that the walk-in refrigerators must be cleaned, the freezers, and more. Each of these surfaces must be sanitized on a regular basis to prevent outbreaks.
Over 200 people were affected, and one person died from the incident. There have been at least 6 lawsuits filed in this case as well.
Sanitizing isn’t just wiping off the surface of something, it is actively killing bacteria off of a surface. The sanitizing process can be done through heat or chemicals, and most places in the foodservice industry do both, depending on what the surface to be cleaned is.
The first thing to do is make a sanitizing solution, test it with a strip to make sure that it’s the right concentration, then thoroughly make sure that each surface is cleaned. Using a solution is really the only way to make sure that a surface is sanitized.
Stopping salmonella outbreaks is easy. It doesn’t take that much time to create a solution and wipe everything down. Not doing it can lead to the issues which happened for a North Carolina restaurant.
