HOTELS & HOSPITALITY
BEING SEEN TOBE CLEAN
Restaurants need to create a good impression on customers if they want to secure their repeat business. Jeremy Bennett from Tork manufacturer Essity, considers how restaurants can inspire more confidence in diners by being seen to be clean.
We restaurant diners tend to be captive audiences while waiting for our meals to be served. Once seated at a table we will have little to do other than to check out our immediate surroundings, particularly during any lulls in the conversation.
Our gaze will idly scan the table itself where any stains on the tablecloth or scraps of food left behind by the previous diner will make an immediate negative impression.
Then our eyes will stray further afield and pick up details we may be hardly aware of on a conscious level. Perhaps we will see the waitress tie back her hair and then serve another diner without first sanitising her hands, for example. Or maybe we will watch a waiter drop a knife on to the floor and surreptitiously wipe it before putting it back on the table.
If the kitchen is open to public view we will inevitably watch our food being prepared, too. Viewing windows that enable diners to watch the chefs at work are becoming increasingly common and while these provide added interest for the customer, they also create more opportunities for any slip- ups in hygiene standards to be witnessed.
The fact that the restaurant kitchen repeatedly draws the customer’s eye came to light in an experiment Essity staged in a Stockholm restaurant some years ago. We used heatmapping technology and equipped a number of volunteers with eye-tracking spectacles to find out what they looked at while awaiting their meals.
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The technology confirmed that the subjects spent a great deal of time gazing into the kitchen, with one volunteer later admitting to keeping a check on the hygiene standards of kitchen staff.
Another diner’s eyes were drawn to the ceiling which had an open ventilation system – something he mentioned later to be an area of concern. And the restaurant décor was also observed from every angle by the volunteers.
Any transgressions these days will not only be witnessed by the people in the room – they may also be shared on line. In one Tork study it emerged that more than half of those people questioned admitted they had at one time or another shared pictures of a restaurant they had visited on social media. This highlights the ongoing need to maintain high standards since any hygiene lapses could be broadcast instantly, often to very wide audiences.
So restaurants need to be seen to be clean. Establishments with viewing windows on to the food preparation area need to ensure that faultless cleaning and hygiene systems are in place and that kitchen staff are never allowed to put a foot wrong.
Commercial kitchens need to be tidy and organised to enable staff to carry out their jobs effectively. All cleaning and hygiene products should be carefully placed in a way that ensures no logjams are created and that everyone can move around the kitchen with ease. And products such as soap and paper towels should be made readily available at
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