A restaurant extraction system is easy to argue about and hard to describe. Everyone in the building agrees the canopy, the filters, the duct run and the fan should be clean. Nobody can say, in the same words, when the job is finished. That gap is what turns each cleaning visit into a negotiation — with the contractor, with the insurer, with the site engineer, and with whichever inspector happens to arrive first.
Acceptance criteria close the gap. They are not a specification for the contractor; they are a description of what your facility will sign off on. Below is how a kitchen or facilities manager can write those criteria for an extraction system without over-committing to numbers they cannot verify.
Write the standard around the surface, not the schedule
The first mistake is accepting a frequency instead of a condition. "Cleaned twice a year" tells you nothing about the state of the duct on day 200. A usable criterion names each surface and states the condition it must reach when the job is signed off:
- Canopy interior and filter frames — no soft, movable grease deposit; the metal should read as metal across the whole surface, including the rear baffle and the lip where the canopy meets the wall.
- Extract and supply grilles, plenums and dampers — free movement, no deposit that restricts the blade or blocks the seal.
- Accessible duct run and access panels — the deposit that remains should be described, not assumed; record what you can see at each panel you open.
- Fan housing and motor exterior — a clean housing is what lets you see a vibration crack or a leaking seal next month.
Write each item as something a competent person can check with a torch, a cloth and a photograph. Anything that requires a specialist instrument on every visit will quietly stop being checked.
Make the evidence part of the criterion
A criterion without evidence is a memory. Ask for photographs of the same reference points before and after each clean, and keep them in one folder per system with a dated sheet that records the surfaces opened, the access panels reached, and the surfaces the contractor declares inaccessible. Inaccessible is a legitimate answer; unrecorded inaccessible is the one that becomes your liability.
Add two operational checks that cost nothing: the system should run and extract normally after the visit, and the kitchen should be usable, with no standing water, no displaced equipment and no residue left on cooking surfaces.
Where the method changes the outcome
Acceptance criteria are also a technical question, because the method decides how quickly a surface can be brought back to bare metal. Cold water and a scrub pad on a canopy that has been collecting cooking fat for months is slow work, and slow work is what gets cut short at the end of a shift. Heat changes the effort: it liquefies the grease so it lifts off rather than being abraded off, which is why steam is used for heavy grease on commercial kitchen surfaces.
If you intend to hold your own cleaning team to a written standard, the equipment has to be able to meet it repeatedly. A central kitchen degreasing machine rated for continuous duty in a kitchen environment gives you a high-temperature, high-pressure process with published parameters you can check against the job: steam temperature, vapour pressure, heating power, tank volume and inlet connection are all stated for the fixed unit, together with dry and wet steam modes and the safety protections for a wet, electric working area.
Two details decide whether a unit fits a real kitchen: the water inlet arrangement and the working voltage. Both are listed per model, and neither should be assumed — a bay or a kitchen riser that cannot supply the connection or the supply the machine needs will force a compromise on the cleaning standard later. The same logic applies to exhaust hood steam cleaning: the criterion says what a clean hood looks like; the equipment has to make that result repeatable without a chemical soak that leaves the kitchen out of service.
Review it as a live document
Re-read the criteria after every second clean and change what the data contradicts. If a surface passes on paper but you are cleaning it again early, the criterion for that surface is too loose. If the crew is spending hours on a surface that never gets dirty, the criterion is too tight and you are paying for it.
Send us your extraction layout, your access panels and the standard you intend to sign off against, and we will specify the cleaning equipment for that standard rather than for a generic kitchen.
