​Clean it and communicate it

Cleanliness has new importance right now – both to your employees and your customers. As you prepare to bring people back into your establishment in greater numbers, promote the actions you are taking to protect everyone’s health and safety. Hyatt, for one, recently announced it is revamping its cleanliness guidelines and appointing a hygiene manager to each of its hotels in the coming months to ensure adherence to the new procedures. Now could be a good time to update your own cleaning procedures and do the kind of deep cleaning and disinfection that is difficult to take on in busier times. When is the last time you steam cleaned your walk-in cooler? Beyond cleaning and disinfecting surfaces such as tables, counters, touchscreens, faucets and light switches, focus on hard-to-reach areas in and around appliances, remote controls, keyboards and other electronics with recessed buttons that can harbor pathogens. While carrying out these cleaning tasks is simply part of running a restaurant, the public has never been more interested in knowing how you’re keeping them safe.

As you maintain your business with the policies and procedures you have implemented, your customers will see differences in your business. Here are some ideas to help with consistent follow through:

• ​Develop a schedule to execute on-going staff training.
• ​Develop and Implement Daily and Hourly Checklists.
• Make the cleaning, sanitation, and personal safety effort demonstrably visible to customers in a tasteful manner.
• Sanitize tables, bar, and all seating after each customer use.
• Between seating’s, clean and sanitize table condiments (if using, we recommend single serve items), digital ordering devices, check presenters, all self-service areas, tabletops, seats, and any other common touch area. 
• Clean and sanitize reusable menus. If you use paper menus, discard them after each customer use.
• Check restrooms regularly and clean and sanitize them based on frequency of use. ​

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• Make hand sanitizer readily available to guests. Consider touchless hand sanitizing solutions.
• Consider marketing your sanitation efforts by dressing those staff members in special uniforms. 
• Temperature Monitoring of customers – we recommend that you follow your state and local laws and take their guidance BEFORE implementing this policy.
• Establish “Non-Contact” transfer of drinks/food between employees.
• Determine if social distancing (or limiting side-by-side working) can be practiced by the staff. 
• Explore installing auto door opening hardware for leaving bathrooms.

​Depending on the type of your operation, following are changes to customer interaction that operators may have to implement:

• Do not allow self-serve soft drink refills (customer will have to get new cup. lid & straw).
• Establish distancing guideline for guests waiting for table or to served.
• In the cases where the operation is sit-down/table service, the operator may want to implement texting to alert the customer that their table is ready.
• If a customer secures their reservation in advance, the operators should implement the policy that the business will text the customer when their table is ready. ​​

• Consider introducing disposable menus, replacing check presenter folios/pens with touchless payment.
• Decide on policies for large parties and what limits there will be if social distancing is in place.
• Tables should no longer have any “permanent” fixtures (besides light/candles) – no table caddies with sugar, no condiments, no menu holders for drink specials, etc. 
• Condiments brought to the table should be in packets (sugar and sugar substitute) or in souffle cups/ramekins.  This will reduce the potential of surface spreading of the virus by having when multiple people touch the same object.
• Coffee Shops and other operations that have “coffee fixings” like cream, sweeteners, stirrers, etc. on a self-serve cart or table, will have to re-think how they deliver those items to the customer.
• At least for the time being, self-serve buffets/food bars will be limited or suspended.

Checklists for reopening

 Health Tracking