If you’re running a catering business out of your home, it’s essentially like running a restaurant. Therefore, you should maintain the same standards that restaurants would for cleanliness and food presentation. Even if you don’t have customers coming into your home, they will be consuming the food you eat. So it is in your interest to keep your house in as good shape as you would a restaurant. Remember the Covid era and the fanatical measures that people took to ensure proper hygiene; you should do the same. So, as part of our catering tips and advice, we’ll delve into some key factors you should know about keeping your home catering business up to the required sanitary standards.
To really be on top of your game as a professional caterer, you need to be pretty fussy about hygiene and other daily practices. So it doesn’t hurt to have a formal checklist of tasks to perform at particular times of the day.
Clean your physical space
The first thing you should be doing every day to keep your kitchen (and the rest of your home) in top shape is making sure it’s clean morning, noon, and night. This means much more than simply swabbing down the countertops and cleaning spills up off the floor. Make sure your windows are clean. You should even look into getting condensation-free energy-efficient windows as they will both lower your energy bills and keep your windows nice and clear so that debris doesn’t gather on them.
As your home is likely heavily trafficked by kids and visitors, you obviously won’t be able to attain perfect cleanliness all the time. But there are measures that you can take to stay on top of things as much as possible. These include:
- Keeping a list of essential cleaning supplies and making sure that you have enough of them at all times. If you run out of something, it will be easy to rationalize it and let some aspects of your cleaning slide. Stay stocked up.
- Be sure that your dining area, and any other areas from which you might bring in foreign substances are cleaned on a regular basis. It wouldn’t hurt to create a written timetable (and maybe get the kids to help!) to make sure that it is done.
- Be sure that food preparation hygiene is followed to a T. This includes food handling, the state of counters, cookware handling, etc. You should have both your own personal codes, as well as those of the state and city to follow as you are essentially acting as a restaurant.
- Every time someone goes through the kitchen, the area should be cleaned thoroughly with the correct substances.
- You should have a list of items to be sterilized regularly, including utensils, your refrigerator and freezer, oven, etc.
It’s a lot to remember, so keeping a written list is essential. Many home catering businesses tend to slack on this because they don’t consider themselves subject to the same laws as restaurants. But if you do, you will be able to minimize potential problems caused by food-borne substances.
Personal hygiene
If you include other people to help you in your catering (as many big operations do), you should treat them as you would restaurant staff. Aside from ensuring that your physical premises are clean, you also need to make sure that others are following the right procedures. If one of your helpers (or kids!) is sick or dirty, you’re automatically exposing all of your customers to potential problems.
Take measures to ensure the following:
- Your assistants need to have all the things that they need to maintain proper hygiene. This includes hairnets for the kitchen, gloves, and other essentials. You should be the one supplying these things; don’t expect your assistants to find them themselves.
- Ensure hand washing. In some parts of the world, running water is scarce and people don’t develop the habit of hand washing regularly. Train your assistants in hand washing as frequently as possible, including:
- Upon entering the house (doors and door handles get touched a lot!)
- After using the bathroom
- Before starting to cook
- Before and after serving food
- Be sure that your assistants maintain clean fingernails. Substances can easily get into the nails and onto food. Also, jewelry should be avoided, even if it includes things like necklaces. Particles can fall onto jewelry and accidentally end up in customers’ food; it is best if this possibility is minimized.
- Be sure that your and your assistants’ clothes are always clean. Given that you’re working from home, it’s easy to slip out of bed and assume that you can just start working in your pajamas. But again, you should treat your kitchen as a restaurant if you are running a catering business.
- Sick people should be kept out of the kitchen and not touch anything that could make its way towards your food operations. This may be a challenge if you have kids as they are always getting sick. But if someone does come down with a cold, you should keep them separate from your food operations as much as possible.
Storing food
Proper food storage is essential for keeping your home catering business in good shape. There is often a long list of items that need to be stored in particular ways, so you should have a good software program that will keep you on top of things. This might not seem necessary if you’re working from home, but again, you should always keep in mind that you’re running a home catering business. Always be sure to check storage requirements for every item that goes into your dishes, and create reminders for yourself so that you don’t have to remember a lot of different dates.
And of course, if something starts to look or smell bad – even if it hasn’t passed its expiration date – be sure to throw it away immediately. You should also make an effort to keep up on food-related news as there could be outbreaks of food-borne illnesses in your area that you might not be aware of.
If you’re just beginning your home catering business – watch this video to learn more:
Conclusion
Running a home catering business can be an exciting job. Having the opportunity to not only create your own dishes but also do it in your own home can be an incredibly rewarding experience. But there are a lot of rules that you need to follow, particularly with regard to hygiene and cleanliness. If you stay organized and keep on top of everything around you, you should stay in good shape to keep your business going for a long time.
