Guides / Compliance
EHO inspections, HACCP, allergens, food safety, the bits of the regulatory work that take real time if you do them well.
The 14 UK allergens are celery, cereals containing gluten, crustaceans, eggs, fish, lupin, milk, molluscs, mustard, peanuts, sesame, soybeans, sulphur dioxide and sulphites, and tree nuts. Every café and restaurant must be able to tell a customer, accurately, which of these are in any dish on the menu.
Read MoreUK law requires chilled food at 8°C or below (5°C is best practice), hot holding at 63°C or above, and a cooking core temperature of 75°C for two minutes or an equivalent time and temperature. You also need calibrated probes, written records, and corrective actions when something goes wrong.
Read MoreSafer Food, Better Business is the FSA's simplified food safety management system for small caterers and retailers. It bundles HACCP-based safe methods with a daily diary you are meant to actually fill in. Treat it as a working document, not a binder. Most operators get pulled up because they do not.
Read MoreHACCP for a small café boils down to three things: find the food safety risks in your kitchen, decide what you do about each one, and prove you do it every day. The seven formal principles sound intimidating, but a workable plan for a small café fits on a few pages once it describes how you actually cook.
Read MoreA 5 star food hygiene rating comes from scoring well in all three FHRS areas: food hygiene practices, structural condition, and confidence in management. One weak area drags the whole rating down. Paperwork and management systems are where most operators lose marks, not cleanliness.
Read MoreAn EHO inspector turns up unannounced, walks through your kitchen, asks a lot of questions, and writes you a food hygiene rating. This is what they look for, what they ignore, and how to be ready without losing a week of sleep to it.
Read MoreCOSHH (Control of Substances Hazardous to Health) is the legal duty to know your cleaning chemicals, the risks they pose, the first aid for each, and to train and document that your team understands it. For a café or restaurant that means SDS sheets, written assessments, safe storage, and proof.
Read MoreA cafe cleaning schedule works when it lives where the work happens, names a specific person for each task, and splits into three tiers: daily open/close, weekly deep, and monthly/quarterly structural (canopy, drains, oven). A perfect schedule no one ticks is worse than none.
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