What Are The Best Flooring Options For Commercial Kitchens?

Safety, sustainability, and indoor air quality are hot topics these days. Responsible organizations are becoming more aware of their impact on the environment as well as the well-being of employees and guests within their facilities. This brings into focus building design and construction, the products being used, and how they are installed.

When choosing a flooring system, safety is always top of mind. To start, you'll want your floor to be slip resistant to protect employees and visitors. In addition, the cleanliness of your floor is also an important safety factor, ensuring the elimination of bacteria, mold, dirt, and other contaminants, especially in food and pharmaceutical environments.

Finally, you may be concerned about the installation procedures or the products themselves. When the floor is installed, can employees still work in the building? Can customers, patients, or visitors enter? Will the floor product itself cause any air quality problems for employees after it is installed? Epoxy floors can offer many safe, sanitary, and sustainable benefits, including those related to the issues above.

When installing a floor in a commercial kitchen sanitary design should be the primary concern. Glue-down sheet goods when installed over old floors are a breeding ground for bacteria. Since these floors have seams (or welds), dirt, bacteria, and fungus can infiltrate and collect in these small spaces and worse, can begin to grow (in the case of microbes) within their openings or between the old floor and the new floor. Any floor with seams can compromise the safety and sanitation of a food facility and cause contamination. Cleaning, no matter how thorough, cannot reach these areas.

While some brands claim slip, fire, and chemical resistance, it is necessary to take a close look at the level of these benefits. For instance, to which chemicals are the floors offering resistance? Even when these floors offer a satisfactory level of protection in these categories, we still need to go back to the floor’s lack of hygienic capabilities. This is not an area where you should compromise.

Durability varies depending on the type of glue-down flooring that is installed, but they are not the most durable floors on the market. Installing these floors in the short term may be less expensive than other options, but repairs and replacements would need to be expected much sooner than floors typically manufactured to handle the food service environment. At best, should you choose to install it, a sheet goods style floor will be a temporary solution for your commercial kitchen.

Quarry tile and acid brick perform well in commercial kitchens. They are exceptionally durable and provide good slip resistance. However, these floors are susceptible to organic attack over time and their grout lines become difficult to clean. For the most sanitary and longest lasting floors, seamless, resinous floors are your best option.

Resinous floors are poured in place, becoming a part of your structure, so there is never a worry about fixing a loose, broken, or cracked tile. This same seamless construction provides the most important aspect of food service flooring – sanitary conditions. Seamless floors, unlike floors with grout or welds, allow no place for dirt to hide or bacteria and mold to harbor and grow. They are the easiest floor to clean thoroughly and the easiest floor to maintain.

Seamless floors for commercial kitchens are long lasting because they are formulated with properties to resist the harsh environment of food preparation and food service. High strength and built to stand up to heavy foot and wheeled traffic, they are chemical resistant and thermal and shock resistant as well.

When manufactured and installed by a reputable company, you can expect your seamless floor to stand up to impact from instruments, high traffic, intense washdowns, organic acids, hot spills and splashes, and temperature changes under kettles and other equipment. Seamless floors also provide benefits such as texture for slip resistance and fire-resistant properties.

Resinous flooring comes in a wide range of color options including custom options. Another benefit of seamless floors is they are a more sustainable option than traditional floors because they will never end up in a landfill after their long life of supporting your kitchen’s business.

Stonhard has a century of experience in manufacturing and installing seamless floors. We focus on research to develop distinct formulations that will perform and last in specific environments, bringing value to our customers when it comes to life cycle costs, performance factors, safety, ease of maintenance, and design options.

Our recommendation for commercial kitchens is our textured, urethane flooring systems designed to protect and perform within the busy and harsh environment of food service. Here are our best floors for your business:

Stonclad UT is a troweled polyurethane, textured mortar system designed to withstand thermal shock and thermal cycling. A high-strength, high-traffic seamless design ensures that your busy kitchen never has to slow down for the repair or replacement of your floor. It’s easy to clean and keep clean!

Stonclad UR gives you the benefits of Stonclad UT with rapid installation and smooth finish.

Stonshield UTS is a polyurethane polyaspartic textured flooring system that resists thermal shock and thermal cycling. Able to be installed quickly, it is abrasion resistant and offers durability for your busy commercial kitchen. It is ultra-slip resistant and is available in a variety of brightly colored quartz aggregate styles.

Don’t forget our wall systems for commercial kitchens:

Stonglaze VSE is a multi-layer, liquid-applied, flexible urethane wall system for sterile environments. This Multi-layer, liquid-applied, flexible urethane wall system for sterile environments. It’s waterproof, smooth, and high gloss and will stand up to rigorous conditions.

Stonglaze VSR is a water-resistant, high-performance, high-solids, high-gloss pigmented wall system with a hard, smooth, tile-like finish.

Want to read more about what you need to know about high-traffic commercial kitchen flooring? Click here!

Stonhard is the unprecedented world leader in manufacturing and installing high-performance polymer floor, wall and lining systems. Stonhard maintains 300 territory managers and 200 application teams worldwide who will work with you on design specification, project management, final walk-through and service after the sale. Stonhard’s single-source warranty covers both products and installation. Contact us to learn more about our precision installation methods and specialized products.