Prime Skills

Every job has a dress code; whether it’s for business attire at the office, a logo filled collared shirt for the cable man/woman or hair netting and gloves for kitchen employees. A uniform represents a personal standing within the company as well as oftentimes, useful for other purposes such as safety and hygiene assurance.

In any food working environment, great, personal hygiene and safety of the employee and consumers goes a long way in food safety. One way to encourage as much cleanliness in the professional kitchen as possible is to require uniform practices that help prevent bacteria from spreading in the food preparation area.

It goes without saying that all kitchen staff are required to come to work clean and wear clean, uniformed clothes and coverings when working with food. If you’ve ever noticed chefs and cooks in the kitchen when dining out, their uniform consists solely of all white. It seems a little silly to those not in the food business that white, the easiest stained colour of all, is used in one of the messiest professions out there. The reason behind it is very interesting though: Safety.

Not only can white be bleached (pure sanitation) every time it’s washed but white is also the most reflective colour which helps keep heat at bay for cooks to stay cooler. Also, these white coats don’t have your typical plastic buttons on them; rather, they contain knotted buttons that don’t melt and are easy to unbutton should a flame or oil accident occur.

You might think, in such a hot kitchen, why do food service employees wear long-sleeved coats? Again, the answer is: Safety. Long sleeves help protect employees from getting burns from boiling liquids or accidental oil spills while also protecting happy customers from flakes of dead skin, drops of sweat or body hair from ending up in their food.

Ideally, work clothes should be long-sleeved and light-coloured (to show the dirt) with no external pockets.  Long sleeves protect both the food and your arms, prevents skin from touching food and helps to stop hairs, fibres and the contents of pockets (which can carry bacteria) getting into food.

When working with raw poultry or other salmonella carrying food, aprons are then typically used over the white chef uniform so that it can be removed without requiring a time-consuming, full change of clothing. Also, to follow any health regulation required in any country, long hair is required to stay tied back while also wearing disposable hair (and beard) nets and rubber gloves.

A good idea to help keep up the sanitation of a professional kitchen is to enforce employees to only put on their kitchen uniforms once they’ve arrives to the food prep area and removed once their shift is over to avoid tracking in dirt and bacteria from the outside. Since reputable food companies need to keep their customers healthy and food-poisoning free, these uniforms, hair nets and gloves are an absolute must!

While hand washing is very effective at preventing the spread of infection by wiping out bacteria as well as cross-contamination of foods, it is less than adequate for getting rid of many viruses such as hepatitis A and protozoa.  One out of every five cases of food-borne illnesses is caused by an infected worker’s hands coming into contact with food, so;

Clean gloves are a better choice than unclean hands.

However, it has not been proven that the use of disposable vinyl, latex or non-latex gloves is a safer method of handling food compared to effective hand washing techniques.  Wearing gloves can lead to a false sense of security and safety and can more than likely cause food contamination if hands are not washed and air dried prior to putting them on; so this can result in cross contamination from raw to high risk food in the same way as it does with hands.

Defects in a significant number of gloves, such as pinholes or punctures, enable bacteria from the hands to pass through the gloves and may result in contamination of high-risk foods with large numbers of pathogens.  Latex gloves can also produce allergic reactions in some people.

The hand environment created by wearing gloves provides the ideal conditions for the growth of bacteria such as staphylococcus aureus.

Cleaning hands before putting on gloves and frequent disposal of gloves minimises the risk for food contamination.

It is good practice to wash hands thoroughly after gloves have been removed as pathogens may have multiplied significantly while the gloves were being worn.  Some workers tend to wear the same pair of gloves for extended periods and it is that complacency that could account for the failure of gloves to prevent bacterial contamination.

Therefore the use of gloves could be counterproductive because workers might tend to wash their hands less frequently.

Food handlers with gloves are more aware they are handling high-risk foods and therefore are less likely to scratch their head and pick their nose or all those other bad hygiene practices that can lead to the spread of bacteria.

It therefore appears that a multi-tiered approach will offer the best protection.

Food service workers need to be educated about hand washing, using proper gloves and preventing ill employees from preparing food. They also need to be provided proper training in proper hygiene with a system put in place for monitoring compliance.