Why have on the job inspections of KEC(Kitchen Exhaust Cleanings)?

Looking up from the hood at one location, you can see

where the unscrupulous cleaning companies clean only

what can be seen.

But placing the camera around the corner we see different.

And looking into the first horizontal run, we can see this has not

been done in years. This job was just "Cleaned" 3 weeks

prior to these pictures.

Another restaurant in same community, you can see

the small area cleaned from above in the vertical riser

in the middle of the picture. The rest of this horizontal

plenum above a char broiler has not been cleaned in years

as you can see clearly. This job had just been "cleaned" 2 weeks

prior. The clean parts were still fairly clean with less than 5 microns

of grease buildup.

One of the communities in the midwest once had one of the top KEC inspection programs in the state only a few years ago. They eliminated the permit program and the on site inspection of the cleanings. At its height, all systems were cleaned to NFPA96 standards with no inaccessible areas and they had one of the best track records in the country. Now, only a few years later, there are vast areas not getting cleaned as the KEC vendors now are all trying to beat each other on pricing and are now skipping areas to reduce costs now that no one is looking any more. Most of the restaurants have no ideas that this is going on or maybe are simply accepting the risk similar to what the companies using National KEC vendors are doing. If one ever wondered if a program works and how fast things go downhill without someone watching, the picture here are proof of what the reality that even some of the companies that were passing inspection previously are now skipping almost everything past what can be seen from the hood. All of these picture are from the same city, different restaurants.