Induction cookers are emerging as a potential solution to extreme heat in professional kitchens, offering benefits beyond efficiency—including significantly lowering indoor temperatures by up to 10 degrees Celsius. With restaurants, cafes, and bakeries across the UK facing closures or reduced hours due to unbearable working conditions during recent heatwaves, the lack of a legal maximum temperature limit adds urgency to the search for safer alternatives. These cookers, which are quieter, cheaper to operate, and easier to maintain, could help mitigate the risks for the tens of thousands of staff enduring hazardous heat in their workplaces. The shift may also address broader concerns about workplace safety in high-temperature environments.
As well as being quieter, cheaper to run and easier to clean, induction cookers can cut kitchen temperatures by up to 10CLeaping flames, searing heat, copious sweat and scorchingly inventive swearing – restaurant kitchens are never a place for the faint-hearted, but this summer they have been sweltering in successive heatwaves to a dangerous degree.Some restaurants, cafes and bakeries in the UK grew so hot that they were forced to close, or reduce their hours, for the safety of their staff. There is still no maximum working temperature, despite calls from the TUC, and tens of thousands of kitchen staff are thought to have carried on working in “furnace-like” conditions. Continue reading...
