Sanitizing for the Holidays: Kitchen Faucet Upgrades
Let’s be honest — holiday gatherings usually revolve around the kitchen. The holidays are the season of culinary specialties and delectable sweets that we want to create and share with friends, family and co-workers. During gatherings in our homes, everyone almost always ends up in the kitchen, pets included. No other room in the house is as busy with so many different functions and so many different people all at the same time. So, keeping it clean—for people and for food—is essential, and the kitchen faucet is one of the main fixtures that makes it all happen.
Importance of Sanitary Food Handling
Kitchen sinks are prime hand-washing territory—the logical first step to clean our hands of dirt and germs to keep them from spreading throughout our home. So when coming in from outdoors or after we’ve completed one of those dirty jobs that just has to get done, the kitchen sink is often the first place we head.
Kitchen sinks are also prime real estate for preparing nearly everything we serve to eat, and proper food handling can mark the difference between staying healthy versus getting sick. Raw meats, soil and even contaminated fruits and vegetables can be sources of dangerous bacteria like Salmonella, Escherichia coli and Listeria. These bacteria as well as some foodborne viruses like norovirus and hepatitis, for example, can cause severe illness that for many people can become life-threatening.
While washing and cooking foods thoroughly prevents many problems, cross-contamination to completed dishes like fruit, salads, desserts or other prepared items always remains a serious concern. Contact with one contaminated food source can spread food-borne bacteria and viruses to other dishes and make people sick. This is why proper food handling and cleanliness are so important.
Kitchen Faucet Upgrades for Safe Food Prep and Handling
Being able to thoroughly clean food, prepping utensils and dishes, cooking surfaces and dirty hands are key to healthy food-handling practices— daily and for special occasions like holidays. Thanks to modern technology, you can now count on smart-design faucets that make every part of washing up easier, safer and cleaner.
Our leading manufacturers know that it all starts with giving you the temperature and amount of water you want without you having to actually grip and turn handles. They also recognize that the ultimate faucet should be a beautiful, stylish asset for your kitchen, too. If you haven’t seen what the latest kitchen faucets can do, here are a few that showcase features you’ll wish your kitchen faucet had:
Delta Broderick Single-Handle Pull-Down Kitchen Faucet With Touch2O Technology
Turn water on or off with a simple light touch of your wrist anywhere on the spout or handle thanks to Delta’s Touch2O Technology, and the temperature will correspond to wherever the handle is set.
- A TempSense LED light changes color—from cool blue to bright magenta—to match water temperature, eliminating surprises.
- ShieldSpray Technology lets you power-jet stubborn messes away but keeps spray contained in a surrounding shield of water that rinses cleanly.
- Touch-Clean Spray Holes repel calcium and lime buildup, offering cleanup with a swipe of the finger.
With its sleek industrial gooseneck design and single handle, the Broderick faucet is easy to keep clean in any of its five available finishes—Arctic stainless, black stainless, champagne bronze, chrome and Venetian bronze. Plus, don’t forget that all you need to make a Delta Touch2O faucet completely touchless is Delta’s VoiceIQ smart technology device.
Moen Sleek Touchless One-Handle High-Arc Pull-Down Sprayer Kitchen Faucet
The name is a bit of a mouthful, but the features are hard to beat. Featuring MotionSense Wave technology, this faucet lets you turn water on and off with a simple wave of the hand. If you do decide to use the easy-lever handle, there’s only one—to use or to clean afterward. It features a pull-down sprayer with Power Clean spray technology that packs 50 percent more spraying power than models without it as well as Moen’s Reflex system that gives you both easy flexible movement for water delivery and secure docking for use as a conventional faucet. The tall gooseneck—15.56 inches—offers both easy clearance and stylish simplicity in black stainless, matte black, chrome or spot resistant stainless.
If you want to take it all to a whole other level, Moen’s numerous lines with Smart Faucet options let you control water four ways—by voice, by app, hands-free or manually. You can specify the exact water temperature and volume to be poured and create an unlimited number of presets. As for hygiene and hand-washing, all Moen’s smart faucets have an available “wash my hands” preset that will wet your hands, pause 20 seconds while you apply soap and then rinse.
InSinkErator Instant Hot Water Dispenser
You can have instant hot water on demand. Better yet, they can safely have instant hot water on demand without interrupting or interfering with what you’re trying to accomplish. While it’s not touchless, it is an efficient and clean resource saver—near-boiling filtered water with an easy flip of a single handle. Thanks to the InSinkErator’s digital touch-screen thermostat, you’ll always have a separate, safe source of good-tasting water filtered and heated to your perfect temperature for everything from making a cup of hot cocoa, tea or oatmeal to thawing frozen foods or kickstarting a boiling pot.
Kick Off a Cleaner Year at Coburn’s
If you’re ready to upgrade your kitchen faucet or explore smart ways of making your cooking space more sanitary, Coburn’s has just what you’re looking for. Explore our inventory of touchless kitchen faucets and voice-control options, or get insights from one of our kitchen design specialists at your nearest Coburn’s Kitchen and Bath Showroom.
SOURCES
https://www.foodsafety.gov/food-poisoning/bacteria-and-viruses
Delta Broderick
https://www.deltafaucet.com/kitchen/product/9190T-DST.html
Moen Sleek
https://www.moen.com/products/Sleek/Sleek-Chrome-One-Handle-High-Arc-Pulldown-Kitchen-Faucet/7864EWC
InSinkErator Instant Hot Water Dispenser
https://insinkerator.emerson.com/en-us/insinkerator-products