Legal and technical classification
This industry operates within a framework of statutory duties, technical guidelines and contractual requirements. The distinction decides who is responsible for what, and which deadline actually applies.
- Statutory duty: operator responsibility
- Health and safety law requires a risk assessment and the measures derived from it for work equipment. A kitchen extract system with fat deposits is such work equipment. The duty to inspect, service and clean therefore rests with the operator – that is, your business, not the service provider.
- Statutory duty: food hygiene
- Regulation (EC) No 852/2004 obliges the food business operator to clean and disinfect premises and equipment adequately and to operate an HACCP plan. That responsibility cannot be transferred. A service provider can carry out and document measures; it cannot take the responsibility over.
- Technical guideline, not a legal norm: VDI 2052
- VDI 2052 describes the professional planning and maintenance of kitchen extract systems. It is a private technical guideline and therefore not a law. It becomes binding through the contract, through insurance conditions or through customary practice – not by itself.
- Employers' liability association rule, not a law: DGUV Regel 110-003
- This rule describes how the requirement is implemented in professional practice. For member businesses the binding instrument is DGUV Vorschrift 1. A rule is not a law, and no legally prescribed cleaning interval follows from it.
- Contractual requirement: evidence and interval
- Whether and at what rhythm cleaning evidence is required is governed by your insurance contract together with your risk assessment. The question of the format and scope of that evidence therefore belongs in the commissioning – not in the drawer after a loss.
- No certification by the service provider
- We document the work carried out. We are not a certification body, and a cleaning company does not issue a certificate of conformity to a technical guideline. If anyone offers you such a document, you should ask who issued it.
The rules named here describe requirements on how the work is carried out — they are not a certification held by BREREI. VDI and DIN standards are chargeable and were not available in full text; where a statement touches the standard in detail, this is noted in place.