Home Café records
Ten records an EHO typically asks a café to show
Environmental health officers do not all work in the same order. If you use the Food Standards Agency pack Safer Food, Better Business for caterers, these are the records they usually want to see.
General information, not advice for your kitchen. The pack itself is free from GOV.UK: Safer Food, Better Business for caterers. Your local environmental health team is the authority for your premises.
The law requires a food safety management system based on HACCP principles (Regulation 852/2004, article 5). SFBB is one way to meet that. You must also register with your local council at least 28 days before you start trading. It is free.
The pack has two halves. The front is the safe methods: how this café controls cross-contamination, cleaning, chilling, cooking and management. The back is the diary, where the day-to-day evidence sits. An officer is looking for a pack filled in for your menu, and a diary that shows you notice problems and deal with them. A month of perfect ticks, with nothing ever going wrong, is less convincing than an honest note.
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Safe methods, filled in for this café
Cross-contamination, cleaning, chilling, cooking and management. Complete them for the food you actually sell. A blank pack, or one still describing someone else’s menu, is the first thing that gets noticed.
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Opening checks
Each day you are open. In the SFBB diary this covers fridges running, the hand-wash basin stocked, staff fit for work, and surfaces ready for service. Tick them after you have looked, not at the end of the week.
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Closing checks
Food covered, labelled and put away, waste out, cleaning done. Do not fill in the closing checks at the start of the day. An officer who sees tomorrow’s close already ticked will not treat the diary as a real record.
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Fridge and freezer temperatures
Write the figure, not only a tick. The legal maximum for most chilled food is 8°C. SFBB recommends a colder working figure, often 5°C, and frozen food kept hard frozen. Your safe method should say what you actually check, and the log should show the readings.
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Cooking and reheating temperatures
Where a dish needs a core check, write the number you measured. The SFBB cooking method uses 75°C as the usual prove-it figure. That is guidance in the pack, not a sentence you can lift out and call the whole of the law. The point of the record is that you checked, and that you can show the reading.
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Cooling records, if you cool food
If you cook ahead and cool, SFBB expects you to cool quickly and get the food into the fridge. Keep a note of how you do it. If you only cook to order and never cool a batch, say so in the safe method and you will not have a cooling log to show.
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Cleaning schedule
What is cleaned, how often, and a note that it was done. SFBB includes a cleaning schedule. You can use another sheet if it says the same things. An officer wants to see that the schedule matches the kitchen, including the pieces of equipment you actually have.
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Allergen information
A written list or matrix for the dishes you sell, kept where staff can reach it, and a way for them to tell a customer. Review it when the menu changes or a supplier substitutes an ingredient. This sits with the allergen safe methods in the pack. It is a different job from the label on food you pre-pack for a customer to take away.
In England, displaying your food hygiene rating is voluntary. In Wales it is a legal requirement.
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Suppliers list and delivery checks
Who you buy from, and a note of the checks on deliveries: temperature where it matters, dates, packaging, and anything you rejected. SFBB has a suppliers’ list for this. A delivery you sent back should appear in the diary, with what you did next.
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Staff training record, and the four-weekly review
Who has been shown the safe methods, and when. SFBB also asks you to review the diary about every four weeks: sign that you have read it, and note anything that needs to change. The review is part of showing that someone is actually supervising the records.
Problems and what you did
Across these sheets, write down what went wrong and what you did about it. A fridge running warm, a probe that failed its check, a delivery you refused. The diary has a box for this. Use it. The record officers trust is the one that shows a problem and a response, not the one that shows a blank month.
A printable set
The UK Café Food Safety Records Pack is a set of printable record sheets for a small café, for the same kind of checks as the list above. It costs £19.99 + VAT. Gumroad, our payment provider, adds UK VAT at checkout. It does not replace the FSA pack, and it does not fill the sheets in for you.