Restaurant Cleaning: How Often Should You Complete a High Dusting at Your Restaurant?

Dust accumulates everywhere, but when it comes to dusting, we most often only dust what we can see. The same can be said for most restaurants. Dusting in restaurants, or more broadly, restaurant cleaning routines, mainly focuses on high traffic areas and surfaces. Most cleaning schedules fall between meeting the local sanitation department’s standards and making sure restaurant patrons enjoy their dining experience in a clean environment.

High dusting, on the other hand, is a more in-depth process that involves a higher standard of clean. If you don’t know what it is, then you won’t know how often you should carry out a high dusting, and that can be the kind of issue that hurts your business in the long run. Don’t sweat it! If you own or manage a restaurant, here’s how often you should complete a high dusting:

First, Let’s Define It

It shouldn’t be hard to figure out what high dusting is. The easiest way to understand it is to think literally – high dusting. This suggests the process includes dusting the areas, fixtures, and surfaces that are high up in your restaurant. This includes ceilings, fans, light fixtures, pipes, walls, air vents, and the top surfaces of tall appliances and furniture.

High also suggests hard to reach, but not all hard to reach areas are necessarily high up. This means that high dusting includes the dusting of all of the hard to reach places and surfaces that are excluded from regular dusting and cleaning. For these reasons, high dusting mostly requires specialized tools and the need to both move large, heavy appliances and furniture to carry out, and the equipment necessary to reach places that most restaurant staff can’t (which can be dangerous).

Why Do You Need To Do It?

High dusting is important for many reasons, the first being that when not done regularly, your restaurant’s business can and will depreciate. A lack of regularly scheduled high dusting will inevitably become obvious to your customers, and this will give off the impression that your restaurant neglects to clean beyond the bare minimum. In short, it’s bad for business.

Other than that, a lack of high dusting can be dangerous to the health and safety of staff and patrons. One thing we’ve learned this past year is that airborne viruses, like COVID-19, can easily attach to and travel with dust particles. A buildup of dust anywhere in your restaurant can contaminate anything from the air to the food, and even the ice and beverages. The last thing you want is for your customers and employees getting sick.

And Finally, How Often It Needs To Be Done

Needs will vary based on your restaurant and volume of business, but industry experts recommend scheduling for professional high dusting as often as monthly, and at least seasonally. In between services, make sure to include thorough, daily dusting in your restaurant’s cleaning routine!