How to write a cleaning schedule for your café or restaurant

Every café gets cleaned. The question an inspector, or a new manager, will ask is whether it gets cleaned the same way every time, including the jobs nobody likes. A cleaning schedule is how you answer “yes” and prove it.

What goes in a cleaning schedule

For each line, write down:

• What: the item or area, specific enough to find (“milk fridge door seals”, not “fridges”)
• How: the method, the product, its dilution and how long it stays on the surface
• How often: after each use, daily, weekly or monthly
• Who: a role (“closing barista”), so it doesn’t depend on one person
• Sign-off: initials and time, plus a space for the manager to check

Clean, then disinfect

Disinfectant doesn’t work through grease and food residue. The FSA’s guidance on cleaning effectively describes two stages for surfaces and equipment that touch food: first clean off visible dirt with hot soapy water, then apply a disinfectant and leave it for the contact time on the label before wiping or rinsing. Use a product that meets BS EN 1276 or BS EN 13697; the code is on the label. A sanitiser that cleans and disinfects in one still needs two applications on a dirty surface.

Put the product name, dilution and contact time on the schedule itself. “Spray and wipe” straight away is the most common way a good product does nothing.

A starting point for a café

After each use, or clean as you go

• Steam wands purged and wiped after every drink
• Chopping boards, knives and prep surfaces cleaned and disinfected between tasks
• Spills wiped up as they happen

Daily

• Espresso machine backflushed, group heads and portafilters cleaned
• Milk jugs, blender jugs and scoops washed and air-dried
• Counters, display fridge shelves and handles cleaned and disinfected
• Hand-contact points: door handles, card machine, till screen, toilet flush and taps
• Floors swept and mopped, bins emptied and cleaned if needed

Weekly

• Fridges emptied shelf by shelf and cleaned, door seals wiped
• Grinder burrs and hopper cleaned as the manufacturer advises
• Behind and under movable equipment
• Microwave, toaster and panini press deep-cleaned

Monthly

• Ice machine cleaned and sanitised following the manufacturer’s instructions
• Extraction canopy filters, if you have a kitchen
• Walls, light fittings and the tops of tall units
• Check the water filter and descaling schedule for the coffee machine

Adapt it to your shop. A restaurant kitchen will have cooking equipment and extraction on a tighter cycle; a bar will add glass-washer, drip trays, beer lines and the cellar.

Keep cloths and equipment apart

If you prepare raw meat, fish or unwashed vegetables as well as ready-to-eat food, use separate cloths, boards and equipment, often colour-coded, and say on the schedule which colour is for what. Single-use cloths, or cloths washed on a hot cycle daily, are the safest choice.

Check that it’s actually happening

A schedule with every box ticked and nothing behind it is worse than no schedule. Do a quick manager check a couple of times a week: open a fridge, look behind the machine, run a finger along a shelf. Sign the manager column when you do, and talk to the team the same day if something was missed rather than at the end of the month.

How Unpickle helps

In Unpickle, each line of your cleaning schedule becomes a repeating job: daily, on selected days, or monthly patterns such as “first Monday of the month”. Jobs can have checklist steps and a required photo, and they appear on staff phones or the shop tablet on the right day with a record of who did them. Anything not done by the end of the day is marked as missed, so the deep clean that keeps slipping is visible. Write the method for each job as an article in the house knowledge base, so new starters can look it up.

Pair this with the opening and closing checklist guide, and see how digital checklists keep the record.

Set up your cleaning schedule free and see it on your phone in a few minutes.