What a food auditor looks for in a Homebush West market or food premises

If a surface cannot be reached, a junction is unsealed, a floor coating has failed or equipment sits directly on the floor with no clearance, then no cleaning frequency will produce a good result. Auditors know this and look for it, which is why a finding often concerns the structure rather than the housekeeping. Increasing cleaning frequency in response is a common and largely ineffective reaction.

A cleaning contractor is well placed to identify these issues because they meet them every visit. A gap that cannot be cleaned, a floor junction holding water, a piece of equipment that has to be moved by two people and therefore never is. Reporting those in writing gives the operator a maintenance list and, if the finding later appears in an audit, evidence that it was raised.

It should state the area, the task, the method or product, the frequency and who performs it. The last field matters most in premises where cleaning is split between staff and a contractor, because a schedule that does not say who does what leaves the gap an auditor is looking for. Both parties' tasks should appear in one document rather than in two that were never compared.

Frequencies should be specific. Daily, after each service, weekly, monthly, quarterly. Phrases such as as required or regularly are the weakest entries in any schedule because they cannot be checked. Where a task genuinely depends on use, state the trigger explicitly: after each delivery, after each cook, at the end of trade. A trigger is checkable in a way that regularly is not.

The record needs to be contemporaneous and it needs to include periodic work. Daily sheets alone rarely satisfy an auditor's question about the deep clean cycle, and periodic tasks are the ones most likely to have lapsed. Completion dates against each periodic item, with any exceptions and their resolution, cover most of what is asked. Where a schedule has been revised, keeping the superseded version dated shows what applied during the earlier period rather than implying the current one always did.

Records should also be locatable during the visit. An auditor asking for the last extraction canopy clean does not want to wait for an email from a contractor. Clean Best provides records to the client as they are produced, and in a form the operator can hand across directly rather than needing to interpret or reformat first. Agreeing the storage location at mobilisation avoids the familiar scene of an operator searching an inbox while an auditor waits at the bench.