Clean Your Commercial Restaurant Equipment with Dry Ice

Clean Your Commercial Restaurant Equipment with Dry Ice

Cleaning and disinfecting in your restaurant’s kitchen is a necessary task, but it can be time-consuming and somewhat expensive. Still, cleanliness of the kitchen and its equipment is of the utmost importance to any manager in the industry. With food being prepared and served to customers in the kitchen area, it is vital to mitigate the risk of dangerous bacteria growth that could lead to contamination. The most traditional method used in the restaurant industry is to bring a cleaning crew into the kitchen to deep clean with harsh chemicals. These methods take extensive amounts of time even with large crew sizes, and the use of chemicals can at times impact the taste of the food being produced.

Dry ice blasting is now approved by the FDA, USDA, and EPA for use in industrial kitchens or commercial restaurant equipment. It has been proven to be more effective, faster, cheaper, and environmentally friendly, especially compared to traditional chemical-based methods. Dry ice blasting is able to decontaminate surfaces by using pellets of dry ice, or CO2, that is pressurized and then directed onto the surface intended to clean. Since dry ice sits at such a low temperature, upon impact the dry ice is able to freeze any contaminate, killing the bacterial growth, and remove it from the surface. Beyond that, dry ice blasting leaves no residue behind and no secondary waste that needs to be cleaned up after a decontamination process.

Dry ice blasting is an easy and effective method preferred by many managers in the food and beverage industry. Dry ice pellets can get to all parts of the equipment that are difficult to reach by other more traditional methods. This is because the dry ice pellets are very small and able to reach every nook of the equipment to allow for a deeper clean. CO2 blasting efficiently removes adhesive, carbon build-up, grease, paper dust, and glue from various surfaces, including conveyors, ovens, chocolate molds, filters, mixing equipment, slicing gadgets, frying and similar processing equipment, bread and pastry machinery, waffle irons, etc. It is a non-abrasive form of cleaning that does not damage the machinery as the pellets sublimate upon contact.

Dry ice is nonconductive and does not introduce any combustible or volatile byproducts so it is safe to use around circuit breakers and switches or even exposed wires. The use of water in dry ice blasting is nonexistent which makes it ideal in a kitchen setting. Water can promote the growth of certain bacteria, such as E. coli and salmonella. It is a much faster alternative to a large cleaning crew with harmful chemicals, mostly because it doesn’t require the dismantling of equipment, and equipment can even be cleaned while it still hot.

There are numerous benefits of using dry ice blasting as the main method of cleaning for your commercial restaurant equipment. In short, dry ice blasting will inhibit the growth of bacteria, gives you the ability to clean equipment in place with no dismantling, reduces contamination by not introducing water or chemicals as secondary waste, is safe for electrical equipment, and saves on time.