Phoenix Journal · Ductwork
A food court crams a dozen cooking concessions and their extract ducts into one building, so compliance becomes a coordination problem. We compare the two models operators use to keep shared kitchen ductwork clean and TR19 Grease compliant.
Kitchen extract at scale
A food court can pack a dozen or more cooking concessions under one roof, yet share a single building, a single fire strategy and, very often, tangled runs of extract ductwork - so the question is not whether the extract system gets cleaned, but who owns that duty and how it is coordinated.
Compliance in a busy food court is a scale problem before it is a cleaning problem. Each unit produces its own grease-laden air, each has its own canopy and filters, and the ducts frequently merge in ceiling voids and risers that no single tenant can reach. Under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 there is rarely one Responsible Person here - the centre operator, the managing agent and every catering tenant can each hold part of the duty, which is exactly why coordination matters so much.
The industry benchmark is BESA's TR19® Grease, which sets out how kitchen extract systems should be inspected, measured and cleaned to control fire risk. It uses a wet film thickness test to gauge residual grease in microns, and treats a mean deposit approaching 50 microns as the trigger for cleaning. The recognised frequencies follow cooking intensity - roughly every three months for heavy use such as continuous frying or chargrilling, every six months for moderate use, and annually for light use. In a food court those categories sit side by side, which forces a genuine choice about how you organise the work.
Below we weigh the two models operators actually use - letting each tenant arrange its own cleaning, versus running one centre-wide programme - so you can see the trade-offs plainly.
In this model every concession is left to book, evidence and pay for its own extract clean. It mirrors how a standalone restaurant would operate, and it puts the cost squarely with the business generating the grease. On paper it looks tidy - each tenant owns its own canopy, filters and the duct it can reach, and each holds its own certificate.
The trouble is that in a food court the ductwork rarely respects those neat boundaries. The moment a tenant's duct crosses into a shared riser or a communal plenum, that surface stops being anyone's obvious responsibility, and the gaps between contractors become the fire risk.
Pros
Cons
Here the centre operator or managing agent commissions a single, coordinated programme covering every canopy, every duct run and the shared plant, with tenants brought in through their leases and the service charge. One specialist surveys the whole system, sets frequencies unit by unit, and reports against a single standard. It treats the food court as what it physically is - one connected extract network - rather than a dozen separate kitchens that happen to share a postcode.
This is the direction most large operators have moved towards, and it aligns naturally with the way fire safety in multi-occupancy food courts has to be managed as a single, building-wide strategy rather than a stack of separate ones.
Pros
Cons
Whichever model you choose, the same technical thresholds govern whether the system is compliant. These are the figures worth pinning to the wall.
Temperature and menu drive fouling as much as trading hours - high-heat frying at oil temperatures around 180°C throws far more grease into the duct than a coffee unit ever will, which is why blanket frequencies fail and unit-by-unit risk assessment wins. The goal is not a certificate for its own sake; it is keeping every internal duct surface below that grease threshold so a canopy fire cannot run the length of the building.
Questions
There is usually no single Responsible Person. Under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 each catering tenant is responsible for their own canopy and local duct, while the centre operator or managing agent typically holds the shared risers, plenums and communal fans. Where duct runs merge, the law expects the various Responsible Persons to cooperate so that every internal surface is actually cleaned - which is why a coordinated programme is so effective.
TR19 Grease bases frequency on cooking intensity rather than a single blanket rule. Heavy use such as continuous frying or chargrilling points to roughly every three months, moderate use to every six months, and light use to annually. In a food court these categories sit side by side, so the sound approach is to risk-assess each unit and clean the shared ductwork to match its most demanding contributor.
Yes. If fire spreads through neglected shared ductwork, a building insurer can examine the cleaning records for the entire system, and one missing or weak certificate can put cover in question for the whole centre. A single verified record covering every unit and the shared runs is far easier to defend than a patchwork of separate tenant certificates on different schedules.
Phoenix Duct Clean · by the numbers
Phoenix surveys and cleans kitchen and building ductwork to the TR19 standard - measured, cleaned and certificated, UK-wide.