The ovens, refrigerators, walk-ins and other appliances are installed and gleaming. Pots and pans hang from hooks within easy reach of chefs and line cooks. The back of the house appears ready for the restaurant to open.

But where will trash cans go? Where will cleaning supplies be stored? Such questions—which are critical to achieving and maintaining safe food-handling and sanitation—often are asked too late; they should be asked before plans for a new or remodeled kitchen are drawn, says Mark Godward, president of Miami-based Strategic Restaurant Engineering (SRE), a unit of Columbus, Ohio-based WD Partners. Food-safety precautions are too important to be afterthoughts, he says.

“Our thinking is that food safety is the No. 1 job, and you have to think through the processes that will guarantee food safety and that will make it easy to execute,” says Godward. “It’s the same when you are designing a restaurant. If you say you don’t want vegetables to cross [contaminate] with raw proteins, then you need to make sure that the tables where you prep raw proteins are well-separated from areas where you are going to do other products that won’t be cooked.

He adds: “Provide those separate areas and also ensure they’re close to where you’re going to store or refrigerate those items. ... You not only want to make your processes easy; you want to make them easy for staff to do the right way.”

Hazard-analysis and critical-control-point (HACCP) procedures are important and can’t be neglected, Godward says. But operators can focus too narrowly on the need to continually monitor food temperatures and cool-down times and pay too little attention to processes. The failure to accommodate garbage near where proteins are prepped is a too-common mistake. “Don’t make [staff] walk 20 feet to a trash can,” he says.

Every kitchen designer plots a space for cleaning dishes, but a failure to adequately plan for storage of clean items so that dishes and utensils are both safe from contamination and easily accessible is another oft-made mistake, says Godward. It’s not a lack of commitment to food safety, he says, but rather insufficient attention to how food safety is maintained that causes problems.

“Make sure you plan areas that are conducive to following the process, that are in the path of doing what you would do naturally,” Godward says. “Make sure you can dispose of things easily, that you have cleaning processes that are easy to execute and that you provide tools—appropriate containers, disinfectants—so that everything can be done easily. There are no excuses, really.”

Limited space is frequently cited as an excuse for inefficient or insufficient food-safety planning, and small spaces do represent a greater planning challenge. However, any space, no matter its size, can be efficiently organized, Godward says.

“Use the third dimension—don’t just think in terms of flat spaces,” he advises. “Can you use the walls? Can you put up shelves or hang things?”

Keep as much small equipment, including slicers and choppers, off counters as possible, he says, because counter placement makes the items more vulnerable to contamination. Know where such equipment will be stored when it is not in frequent use.

“That’s why you’ve got to think through all these things before you build or before you have final plans, because when you think about them, you will realize that the space you need is there.”

Consider the movement through the kitchen of raw and cooked foods as well as the flow of staff when designing kitchen space.