In any foodservice operation time is extremely precious, and it never feels like there is enough of it! Use your time wisely by equipping your kitchen with the right products to support your employees. It would be great if employees could spend all their time cooking, but prepping, cleaning and organizing are necessary to keep the kitchen going. Limit time spent on these other activities by choosing the right shelving. When food is organized properly on clean shelving, your employees can focus on the most important thing: the menu! Check out these three ways Camshelving can save labor hours at your operation:

1. Spend less time…looking for ingredients

Poorly organized walk-ins and storage areas can make it difficult to find what you’re looking for. When you’re taking out containers and pushing others out of the way, it can feel like you’re crawling into the fourth dimension to find pickled vegetables. Camshelving’s shared posts and open corners create an exposed space that allows you to easily see and reach your ingredients. Rather than looking at your containers with a blocked view, Camshelving’s design allows you to see as much of your inventory as possible.

BONUS: Take it a step further and add Cambro ID Tags. These tags easily clip onto traverses to help identify stored items quickly. They are available in multiple sizes to cater to any item you’re storing.

2. Spend less time…cleaning

Many operations don’t clean their shelving very often (or at all) because of the time and energy it takes to do it properly. Cleaning up big spills on metal or epoxy shelving means pulling off all the shelves or dragging out the entire unit for a hose-down. Not only can Camshelving shelf plates be taken off without disturbing the other shelves, they are dishwasher safe. If you’re worried about cleaning underneath units, Camshelving has two ways for you to win. The bottom shelf of each stationary Camshelving unit is six inches off the ground (a food safety rule to keep in mind as well), giving you plenty of room to slide a towel or mop underneath. For deep cleaning, easily remove the bottom traverse and shelf plates to mop without having to take apart your entire unit. You can also add caster accessories to your Camshelving if you’d like to be able to quickly move the units out of the way to clean.

Before Camshelving, three employees at Christian Health Care Center were needed to lift and drag their heavy, metal shelving in order to clean it properly, said Eric Van Kruiningen, the facility’s food services and nutrition manager. “Now I can assign one employee to the task of cleaning,” he said. “An entire refrigerator with eight units can be done in 30 minutes.”

 In addition to saving time, Camshelving supports food safety while you’re cleaning. Removable shelf plates reduce the risk of chemical contamination because shelf plates are transported to a designated warewashing area and the sanitizing process is done completely away from food.

3. Spend less time…replacing rusty shelving

Metal shelving is replaced an average of every three to five years. Metal rusts; that is an unavoidable fact. This means every few years you’re having to move your food out, clear out the old racks, put together new racks and take apart the old ones for transport to the dump.

“What I liked about Cambro was that there weren’t pieces that were going to rust. Even if you get the epoxy-coated metal ones, if you rub the epoxy with something and it scratches, it starts to rust. Then after a while you have to replace it because we can’t have any rust on anything we have in the kitchen,” said Carl Bowen, Director of Nutritional Services at New York-based Adirondack Health.

Stop wasting your time—and creating possible food safety hazards once the shelving rusts—and switch to something that lasts forever. Camshelving not only comes with a lifetime warranty against rust and corrosion, there is an antimicrobial protection permanently molded into its shelf plates to inhibit the growth of mold, fungus and bacteria.

Download the Cambro App or click here to use Cambro’s Shelving Selector Tool to find the best shelving for your operation. Need more help? Contact a Cambro rep.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: ADRIANA DESIDERIO IS THE DIGITAL CONTENT MANAGER AT CAMBRO.