10 Tips to Good Kitchen Hygiene (2024)

Food safety and good kitchen hygiene are closely interlinked, but most of us still tend to take shortcuts when handling fresh food. Many parents try and involve their offspring from an early age in domestic food preparation, and cooking alongside children can be rewarding in terms of quality time and from an educational perspective. Studies have shown that hygienic habits introduced from a young age are likely to stay for life. What you do now, your children will do later. These are the top 10 tips for Good Kitchen Hygiene in households with children:

1. Remove rings, and wash hands properly before you start. Germs thrive on your hands and spread very easily onto food.
2. Clean your counters. Kitchen counters live a pretty rough life, between spills and crumbs, grocery bags, and homework, to name some. Perhaps you tend to leave your keys or wallet on the counter? Clean it off with hot water every day, and at least once a week with a detergent.
3. Clean your cutting boards. Your average cutting board could have more than 200 percent more fecal bacteria on it than the typical toilet seat. Keep it clean! Hot running water and a good scrub do the trick. Use detergents on plastic cutting boards and half lemon and salt work fine with wood.
4. Wash fruit and veggies. Use cold running water to remove pesticides and dirt from fruit and vegetables. Besides, you never know how many hands touched the apple before you bought it.
5. Keep raw food chilled. Especially meat and fish should not be removed from the fridge before the maximum of 30 minutes before use.
6. Wash your hands when changing station. Again, washing hands are critical to good kitchen hygiene. Just make it a habit.
7. Don't leave dirty dishes to pile up in the sink. This is actually a nasty habit of laziness or convenience, but a theme park for bacteria.
8. Wash your hands before you eat. Yet again: Wash your hands! Try and keep the germs from the kitchen in the kitchen, don't bring them along to the table.
9. Keep food waste in a closed bin. You do recycle, right? Good! A closed container or bin keeps unwelcomed insects away.
10. Sanitize your faucet on regular basis. Your faucet is actually a bacteria heaven, every time you turn it on with greasy unclean hands you transfer germs onto it. When you turn it off, after cleaning your hands, the faucet transfers some of the germs right back to your hands. Keep it clean, or better still: Invest in a touchless or hybrid faucetand the problem is gone forever.

Oras Optima's touchless function helps to improve kitchen hygiene.

Water-saving tip

Bathroom faucets run at about 7.5 litres of water a minute, according to the US EPA (Environmental Protection Agency). Never let faucet water run needlessly when you wash your hands or face, apply shampoo and conditioner in the shower, brush your teeth or shave – it will save you thousands of litres a month.