I see a lot of different workplaces in my travels, mostly office environments, and in many of these places the resident staff are the ones tasked with buying the products for cleaning the kitchens.
The usual number of cleaning products in a kitchen is 4 or 5, and there's a huge propensity towards anything labelled anti-bacterial. Which tells me that a lot of people fall for this.
What if I told you that people developing these products start with an idea, not a product? Say, this one - "Shoppers are scared of germs!" and THEN they create a brand new product that didn't even exist, that you will think you need? "Hey, let's make something new that is anti-bacterial, people will think they need it!"
Next thing you know, we have anti-bacterial varieties of kitchen wipes, kitchen sponges, kitchen scourers, kitchen cloths, kitchen deodoriser, fridge cleaner and kitchen spray. And people think they're needed.
Massive Myth: That everything needs to be sterile.
No, you do not need to kill every microbe on every surface, and in fact, you can't. Even hospitals don't manage this. The most basic way to keep your home safe from dangerous germs is to clean up two things: debris and YOUR HANDS.
If you have basic food hygiene knowledge, your kitchen will not breed dangerous levels of bacteria or pests. This basically means don't drip raw meat juice over everything, and clean up all spills and crumbs straight away. Then wash your hands with ordinary soap. Not anti-bac soap even. Just whatever hand soap.
Your kitchen benchtop is like a table - it's not a surface you should aim to prepare food directly on. This means, if you spill coffee powder, or some crumbs, it is no big deal to simply wipe it with a wet cloth and rinse the cloth. If it's something that goes "off" at room temperature, like milk, sauces or, yes, raw meat, then just hit it with a simple kitchen cleaner spray and wipe that off. In that case you'd throw the wet cloth into your washing basket, of course, not have it sitting there for later on. If you think you need anti-bacterial, you do not. Pop into your local pound shop and get yourself a single bottle of "multi purpose cleaner" concentrate. Fill a spray bottle with cold water then add a capful. Done.
Why don't I need anti-bacterial magical cleaning products in my home?
Microbes only become a big problem if they are left with food to eat, at a temperature that helps them grow to large numbers. If you leave raw chicken juice on your kitchen counter overnight, it's a nice warm environment out of the fridge and the bacteria will breed in the chicken juice and multiply. If you then place your breakfast plate in the bacteria soup the next morning, then pick that up and get the bacteria soup all over your hands, then shove those in your mouth, well you might get rather unwell. But if you wipe up that juice, and clean the surface to remove the rest, then the few bacteria in that juice will not have anywhere to multiply all night and become dangerous. Then your plate has nothing to collect and your hands aren't bathed in gribblies.
Same goes with crumbs. If you don't leave them around for creatures to eat, then they don't attract creatures which crawl all over your benches eating them! (Logic right?)
As for cleaning your sink after you wash up? Forget the magical new products and just use your kitchen scourer with some dish detergent. There's also a marvellous product called creme cleanser if you really can't shift marks like tea stains. It's that yellow thick liquid that has tiny grains of sand in it and goes by the brand name Cif (Jif). And the generic version works just as well.
Kitchen floor? One mop bucket, half a bucket of hot water, then add a cap of that generic all purpose cleaner. Mop the floor. Sorted. And just like your bench, if you spill something, wipe it up.
So why are the shops full of these specialist kitchen cleaning products?
For the same reason the shops are full of every other kind of junk. Because people buy them and companies spend money to convince you to buy them.
I, on the other hand, will not get rich telling you this!
But I do have some snake oil for you to buy...
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