If you are working in a kitchen, dealing with food preparation for others to consume, then you naturally already know how important hygiene is. However, whilst hair nets and aprons are common to almost every kitchen, many kitchen workers don’t realise just how useful and practical gloves can be in their industry.

Vinyl gloves are often used by kitchen workers to aid their hygiene practices; using disposable gloves is easier and quicker than frequent washing, and prevents damage to your skin through over-washing. This helps to prevent one of the biggest causes of food-borne illness: cross contamination. By simply ensuring that you change your gloves between different tasks – for example, between handling raw meat and handling cooked meat – you ensure that you don’t carry over any harmful bacteria.

They can also provide a measure of safety for the worker, for example, when handling hot peppers. It can be very difficult to wash every last trace of the peppers away from your hands and underneath your nails, and discovering a remnant when you accidentally rub it into your eye can be extremely painful. By wearing gloves during preparation and clean up, you will ensure that none of the hot pepper juice remains on your hands afterwards.

Gloves are also important if you have any cuts or injuries to your hand; even if you have a plaster over the injury, the glove provides an additional barrier against accidental contamination of the food, ensures that the plaster itself won’t accidentally fall into the food, and guarantees that your injury won’t be exposed to food substances like lemon juice which would cause you pain.

Vinyl gloves are generally chosen for kitchen work because they provide a low-cost disposable option which gives the right balance of protection and tactile sensitivity for food preparation tasks. However, they also have another advantage – studies have shown that latex gloves can shed enough latex proteins in food preparation to cause a reaction in the severely allergic, whereas vinyl gloves do not present a risk.

Other allergic reactions can be prevented by the correct use of gloves in kitchen preparation; for example, by preventing the contamination of nut-free foods with traces of nuts from another area of the kitchen, or even from the worker’s breaktime snack.

With all these considerations, it’s easy to see why disposable vinyl gloves are a vital piece of hygiene equipment in any kitchen.