How to Perform a Commercial Kitchen Risk Assessment

Safety is paramount in any commercial kitchen, from a school kitchen to a QSR. For this reason, risk assessments and hazard management plans are essential to the running of your kitchen and integral to the well-being of both your consumers and catering staff.
In our guide to commercial kitchen risk assessments, we’ll cover the essential steps from identifying hazards during the design stage, flagging any further risks on-site and establishing how best to mitigate them. We’ll also cover the creation of a HACCP plan for risk management.

Why Perform a Risk Assessment for a Commercial Kitchen?

There are many potential risks when operating a commercial kitchen, from hot cooking equipment injuring catering staff to contaminated food causing illness. Preempting these issues is crucial to maintaining a stellar reputation for your commercial kitchen business.
Furthermore, risk assessments are a legal obligation for all commercial kitchens under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, which outlines employers’ responsibilities to keep their workers and members of the public safe.

Who Should Perform a Commercial Kitchen Risk Assessment?

While it is the employer’s responsibility to ensure that a risk assessment is completed, it can be performed by any competent person. This means someone with the necessary training, experience, skills, and knowledge, such as a manager or head chef.

When Should You Perform a Risk Assessment for a Kitchen?

A commercial kitchen risk assessment should be performed before the kitchen is in operation, preferably during the initial design stage. Giving significant thought to risk mitigation during this stage can pay dividends after the kitchen is installed and in use. Some of the major considerations including allowing sufficient room and space for workers to move safely, and considering the placement of equipment. For example, placing a sink next to a fryer could lead to an accident should water encounter the hot oil. Ensuring that food storage and waste are effectively segregated and cross-contamination is eliminated are also examples where good design can support the management of risk.

Once the kitchen is installed, a site risk assessment should be performed to ensure risk mitigation is clear for the kitchen that has been built. You should then repeat your risk assessment regularly to ensure it is up to date.

Any significant changes in the kitchen will also require a new risk assessment to be performed. This may include new equipment, layout changes, changes in procedure, or an accident occurring.

What Are the Steps of a Commercial Kitchen Risk Assessment?

All risk assessments are broken into the following steps. We have highlighted how these steps might be interpreted in a commercial kitchen environment.

1. Identifying Hazards in a Commercial Kitchen

Hazards are the activities, processes, items and substances that could lead to harm in your commercial kitchen. Staff input and previous accident logs can help with identifying these hazards, which may include:

Slippery floors with poor drainage
Hot cooking equipment
Cleaning chemicals
Boiling water
Shelving and reaching high shelves
Delivery areas and obstructions
Walk-in fridges and freezers, especially with lockable doors
High traffic areas, including corners or doorways

2. Who Might Be Harmed and How?

With each hazard you identify, you will need to understand who it might harm and how. For example, hot cooking equipment could burn a chef, pot washers could suffer skin irritation from harsh soaps, porters could strain their backs from carrying heavy equipment and more.
Vulnerable groups of people should also be considered—are there items or processes within your commercial kitchen that could prove hazardous to young people or chefs with disabilities? At Airedale, we can help you create a DDA-compliant commercial kitchen that reduces risk for disabled employees.

3. Evaluate Risks

Once you’ve identified the hazards, who they might hurt, and how, you should evaluate how likely the harm is to be caused and put measures in place to counteract them.
This can include implementing processes for walk-in fridges to prevent employees from locking themselves in, rules for handling hot items, carefully selecting cleaning chemicals, ensuring a strong ventilation system for smoke management, and more.

4. Record and Share Findings

All of these hazards, who they may harm, and what is being done to control the risks will then need to be documented and shared with staff. This is a legal requirement if you have more than five staff members; however, sharing this information is advisable even for smaller kitchen teams, such as a ghost kitchen crew.

Commercial Kitchen Risk Assessment vs HACCP

Both a risk assessment and HACCP system are required to run a commercial kitchen by law.
HACCP, standing for Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points, is an internationally recognised food safety system that identifies hazards to food safety in your operation and applies preventative measures to them.

What Are the HACCP Principles?

HACCP operates by seven key principles:

Hazard Analysis
Identifying Critical Control Points
Establishing Critical Limits
Establishing Monitoring Procedures
Creating Corrective Actions
The Verification of the HACCP Plan
Record Keeping

How to Set Up a HACCP System

HACCP systems are complex and extremely detailed. Below, we have given a general overview of the essential steps.

Your HACCP Team

To create a HACCP system, you must assemble a competent and experienced team. This team should consist of people with relevant experience in the production of your food products, such as chefs, managers, logistics, and quality assurance representatives.

Identify Your Product(s)

Identifying the products, such as meals, that your commercial kitchen will prepare allows you to identify the hazards posed. You should include in-depth details such as:

Ingredients
Food groups
Allergens
Physical dimensions
How it’s stored

Identify Your Consumers

Certain consumer groups may have hazards that are more unique or prominent to them, e.g., children, the elderly, the ill, and pregnant people. So, if you operate a school, care home or hospital kitchen, you may have more hazards to consider than, for example, a restaurant kitchen.

Develop a Flow Diagram of Your Commercial Kitchen Operation

This flow diagram deals with the production process of your products, from ingredient delivery to service. This must be as accurate and comprehensive as possible so that you can correctly identify hazard points.

Identify Hazards Within the Flow Chart

Reading through your flow chart, identify where the hazards to food safety are in your process. These can include:

Biological hazards (salmonella, e. coli)
Physical hazards (stones, bones)
Chemical hazards (cleaning solutions)

Identify the point at which the hazard would likely occur, and list the likelihood of hazard occurrence, length of illness caused and the risk of damage.

Identify Critical Control Points

Critical control points are points in your process where measurable controls and critical limits can be implemented to mitigate hazards. These can include storage, delivery, service, cooking, cooling, and reheating.

Establish Critical Limits

Critical limits refer to the highest and lowest acceptable values for your food safety control factors, including:

Time/temperature combination for cooking food
Chlorine levels of cleaning products
Hot holding (e.g. soup kettle, bain marie) temperatures
Cold holding (e.g. fridge, freezer) temperatures
Beverage pH
Internal temperature for raw meats
Ambient temperature of storage

Build a Monitoring Procedure System

This ensures that the proper practices are taking place at your critical control points. Observations include physical and chemical monitoring procedures, with monitoring forms or logs that will need to be filled in by an assigned person. The form should include parameters to be monitored, how they are monitored, frequency of monitoring, who monitors, and, finally, a summary plus notes.

All employees must be fully trained in monitoring procedures, and records should fully represent what occurred during the food processing.

Identify Corrective Actions

Corrective actions are the procedures in place for if and when your food safety system fails, such as a critical control point failing to control a hazard. This could include:

A thermometer failing to accurately measure temperature
Malfunctioning storage
Broken hot or cold holding equipment
Food contamination with bacteria, undeclared allergens, etc.

A crucial part of corrective actions is auditing why the action had to be applied in order to avoid future occurrences. This can be helpful in deciding what planned preventative maintenance may need to be adopted, among other measures.

Verify Your Plan

The plan must be based on scientific, proven facts and therefore, steps must be verified. Initial validation can be done via internal audits, while future ongoing validation may include external audits, health inspections and more.

Types of verification systems include:

Reviewing monitoring records
Operational limit revision
CCP evaluation
In-house plant observations

Extensive documentation should also be kept regarding your HACCP plan, with all documents kept for a minimum of two years.

When you design, install or maintain a commercial kitchen with Airedale, our experts are happy to advise you on risk management and more for successful catering, incorporating risk-mitigating elements into the design of your kitchen.
Contact us today to see how we can help you create a safer industrial kitchen for your food service facility.