Like any business, restaurants try to avoid unnecessary costs. Decorating the dining areas improves how the restaurant appears to your customers, while decorating the kitchen with rubber floor mats may seem pointless. If you are a restaurant owner, you might wonder why kitchen floor mats are often made of rubber. You may wonder whether a nitrile rubber mat is any different from any other kitchen floor mat. Perhaps, you wonder if you should invest in kitchen floor mats at all. However, a rubber mat is more than a mere decoration for the kitchen. A kitchen floor mat lowers fatigue, increases employee safety, and keeps spills off the kitchen floor.
“Dura-Chef Interlock Commercial” Kitchen Mats
Kitchen floor mats can provide a comfortable surface that reduces fatigue in employees. Most kitchen floors are hard and uncomfortable to stand on. Because restaurant employees stand for long periods of time during their shifts, the discomfort in their feet gradually develops into fatigue, reducing their productivity. Unlike a hard kitchen floor, fatigue kitchen mats are made from rubber, which is soft and comfortable to stand on. These rubber floor mats provide cushioning for employees’ feet, slowing the rate at which they develop fatigue and allowing them to work more productively during their shift. Some fatigue kitchen mats are made with foam rubber, which provides more cushioning for your employees’ feet and further reduces their fatigue.
“Kitchen Mat” Grease-Resistant Rubber Mat
“Kitchen Mat” Grease-Resistant Rubber Mat
- Can be cleaned in a dishwasher
- Nitrile rubber can also resist chemicals
- Comes with beveled edges that allows easy access for wheeled equipment
- Perfect to use as a kitchen chef mat, bar mats, restaurant runners, poolside mats, locker room mats, and even as industrial mats
Best Safety Mats: When you buy these rubber mats, you are buying safety. Their safety applications are twofold. The first is most obvious, which is the way they drain liquids. That will make the surface of the mats less slippery. The other way they increase safety for you is due to the raised pill-shaped design that surrounds the drainage holes. This design enhances traction and will make sure that everyone who steps on the mat will remain safe.
Resists Grease: This rubber mat has the benefit of being made from nitrile rubber. Nitrile rubber was designed to be grease-resistant from the beginning, with the first nitrile material coming onto the market after World War I. This property makes them even better safety mats. So not only do the drainage holes let the grease seep through, the nitrile material will prevent the mats from being damaged by it.
Rubber floor mats also provide an anti-slip surface that improves safety for employees in the kitchen. Restaurant employees move around the kitchen frequently, with kitchen staff carrying ingredients and utensils to food prep areas while servers enter and exit with customers’ orders. Water and other liquids spill on the floor throughout the day, putting employees at risk of slipping and falling. Fortunately, the surface of a rubber mat helps to reduce slip-and-fall accidents. Rubber naturally resists water, allowing spilled water to be cleaned up more easily. Rubber also has a high coefficient of friction. As a result, people have increased foot traction when walking on a kitchen floor mat than on a bare kitchen floor, making them less likely to slip and fall on spilled liquids. By using kitchen floor mats, restaurant owners can help to minimize the hazards of slippery floors in their kitchens.
In addition to their anti-slip surface, many kitchen floor mats have large drainage holes that trap spilled water. These holes allow spills to drain off the top of the mat, providing a relatively dry surface for people to walk on, while also keeping spilled liquids from flowing across the floor. Since the mat keeps both its top surface and the surrounding floor safe to walk on, drainage mats further reduce kitchen employees’ risk of slipping and falling. Some drainage mats have holes large enough to contain solid debris and keep it off the floor as well.
“Dura-Chef Octagon” Rubber Kitchen Mats
“Dura-Chef Octagon” Rubber Kitchen Mats
- Eco-friendly reclaimed floors
- Underside of mats has a surface texture that grips base flooring
- Perfect for commercial applications such as kitchen chef’s mats, poolside areas, locker rooms, restaurant bar mats, and more
Easy Drainage: These are best used as chef’s mats, bar mats, poolside mats, or any other place that sees a lot of wetness. Water and other miscellaneous liquids will easily seep through the octagonal holes, leaving the surface of these anti-fatigue mats free of excess liquids that can cause a hazardous slip. Additionally, since liquid does not stay on these rubber mats, moisture-caused byproducts like mold and mildew will never form.
Increased Safety: One of the biggest benefits of having rubber mats is that they increase safety. No one wants to suffer from a nasty fall that could have easily been prevented. With these eco-friendly reclaimed floors in place, your feet will be granted a degree of extra traction that will help them stay secured. Having a non-skid mat around will help keep you and your guests upright on your two feet.
Be More Comfortable: Whenever you stand around in one place for too long, your feet become tired. When they get tired, inevitably the rest of you will get tired. Anti-fatigue mats are an easy solution for relieving the pressure that builds up in your feet. The rubber material in these reclaimed floors absorbs weight and dissipates pressure.
Kitchens work with a variety of liquids, and spilled cooking oil causes just as much of a slip hazard as spilled water. Rubber, vinyl, and other polymers tend to disintegrate when they come into contact with oil or grease, so many types of matting do not handle oil spills very well. Fortunately, some kitchen floor mats are made from a special type of rubber called nitrile rubber. Nitrile rubber is resistant to grease and oil, just as other types of rubber are resistant to water. As a result, oil spills are easier to clean up on a nitrile rubber mat than on vinyl flooring or other types of rubber matting. Just as other rubber floor mats protect employees against slipping on spilled water, a nitrile rubber mat also protects employees from slipping on spilled oil. A nitrile rubber mat is particularly useful in kitchens where grease splatters frequently, such as areas where deep-fried or pan-fried dishes are prepared.
Rubber floor mats provide a considerable level of utility for kitchen employees. They are comfortable for employees to stand on and protect them from falling on slippery floors. A kitchen depends on the health of its employees as much as the satisfaction of its customers. By using kitchen floor mats, owners can look out for their employees, and in turn, for the kitchen as a whole.