What Is The Best Glove For Handling Food?

Whether you’re cooking at home, or working within the food industry, it’s always important to think about potential hazards and consider what PPE you could be using to protect yourself and others around you.

Which glove should I choose?

The best option for handling uncooked food, or anything in a food preparation environment, is a disposable glove. There are a number of benefits to using disposable gloves:

Disposable gloves protect the wearer from handling raw food and create a barrier between the wearer and the product, ensuring that no harmful bacteria is passed from one to the other and therefore reducing the spread of contaminants.
Disposable gloves can be taken off and disposed of without any hassle, and save time from not washing your hands between every stage of food prep. Reducing the amount of times you wash your hands also benefits your skin, as constant washing leaves your hands prone to dryness and in turn dermatitis.
Disposable gloves have a tight fit, and offer a high level of dexterity and sensitivity and won’t have a negative impact when it comes to the handling of light foods.

Latex or Nitrile?

While Latex offers all the same benefits as a Nitrile glove, the Nitrile glove would be the better option within the food industry due to the potential allergen risk associated with Latex. Whilst working at home this may pose no potential risk, however, whilst working within the food industry Nitrile gloves are the safer bet to eliminate the risk that of a customer coming in to contact with allergens.

Nitrile gloves are also inherently resistant to a number of chemicals and substances found within the kitchen environment and generally offer a level of puncture resistance.

We would recommend using one of the following products:

Hantex Nova

https://www.safetyfix.co.uk/gloves/disposable-protection/nitrile/hantex-nova/

Or for a longer glove, with extra protection, the UCi DG-MAXIM-30/BL

https://www.safetyfix.co.uk/gloves/disposable-protection/nitrile/uci-dg-maxim-30-bl/

Other risks to avoid

Cross contamination isn’t the only risk to consider when working in a food preparation environment. You also need to consider the temperatures that may be involved.

When working with hot temperatures, it is important that the person preparing the food has a good level of heat protection.

For protection against contact with heat we would recommend using one of/a combination of the following: