A Safer Food, Better Business diary asks for a small amount of evidence every day: that you opened up safely, that your fridges were cold, that anything you cooked was cooked properly, and that you shut down safely. Four weeks of that adds up to a review, and the reviews add up to the record an inspector reads.
None of that changes in the app. What changes is how long it takes and how much of it you have to remember.
Opening up
- Open today. The diary lands on the current day. You do not go looking for the right page.
- Run the opening checks. The standard SFBB list, plus any extra checks you have added for your own kitchen. Tick as you go.
- Take your fridge temperatures. One reading per unit for the morning slot, set on a dial. Anything above 8°C shows amber rather than sitting quietly in a column of numbers.
- Sign it. The entry is signed with your name. If a colleague opened up instead, it carries theirs.
During service
Cooking records are made when you cook, not from memory at 11pm. Each batch is recorded as its own record with a core temperature of 75°C or above, or start and finish times if you prove your cooking by time instead.
Cooling and reheating attach to that same batch as later stages, even if the reheat happens days afterwards. If a cool-down took more than 90 minutes from the end of cooking, the app says so, because that is the point at which the pack wants you to think about your method rather than just write the number down.
Food held hot for service gets checkpoints at two, four and six hours on display, prompting for 63°C or above at each one.
Shutting down
Closing checks work like the opening ones: tick, sign, done. Evening fridge readings go into the afternoon slot. If anything went wrong during the day, that is what the incident log is for: what happened, what you did about it, and how you will stop it happening again, which are the same three questions the paper pack asks.
The day you missed
Everyone misses days. A paper diary handles this badly: you either leave the gap or you fill in a week of checks in one sitting with the same pen, which is exactly what an experienced inspector is trained to spot.
The app is honest about it instead. The calendar shows which days are complete and which have gaps, so you can see the shape of your record at a glance. You can go back and fill a day in, and the entry still carries the name of whoever made it. What you get is a record that reflects what happened, which is more useful to you and more credible to your inspector than a tidy fiction.
The four-weekly review
Every four weeks the pack asks you to look back: did anything change, did anything go wrong, does your safe method still describe what you actually do?
The app assembles that review from the diary you have already filled in, so the question becomes a reading job instead of a research job. Read it, add anything the diary cannot know, sign it. It prints with the rest of the pack.
Is a digital diary still an SFBB diary?
The SFBB pack does not require paper. What it requires is that you keep the records and can produce them. The app prints every record onto the official FSA forms, filled in with your answers, so what an inspector receives is the pack they already know rather than an export from a system they have never seen.
Your local authority always has the final say on your food safety management system. If you want to be sure before your next visit, generate the EHO pack and show it to them. It takes one tap and it is the whole thing.
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Tomorrow morning, on your phone
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