The Food Safety AppHow to improve your food hygiene rating
A rating is three separate judgements added together, and they are not equally hard to change. Two of them describe your premises and what an officer saw on the day. The third asks whether your kitchen can be trusted to keep food safe when nobody is watching, and it looks at your processes, your training and your systems, not at the building.
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Most advice on raising a rating is about the kitchen itself, and the kitchen is the expensive part. Re-tiling a wall, moving a sink or putting in better ventilation takes money and time, and the result is not published until the council acts: usually a visit, though an appeal can be decided without one.
The third score is different in kind. It is about how your kitchen is run, which the Food Standards Agency describes as your processes, your training and your systems, and an officer reads all three partly through what you write down. Inspection day and the records behind your rating sets out what is scored. This page is about what to do next if you already have a rating and want a better one.
The three scores do not move in equal steps
Each area is scored in demerit points, where zero is fully compliant and higher is worse. What is less widely known is that the three are not banded the same way, and it changes where effort pays.
| Score | The bands it can take |
|---|---|
| Food hygiene and safety | 0, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 |
| Structure and cleanliness | 0, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 |
| Confidence in management | 0, 5, 10, 20, 30 |
Confidence in management has five bands, not six. It skips 15, so its upper half moves in tens: 30 to 20, then 20 to 10. Food hygiene and structure move in fives the whole way. That is the practical difference between them, and it is the reason there is no small step between “generally satisfactory” and “major improvement necessary” on the management score.
Which score to work on is a judgement, and the officer’s report is what says where the problems were. What is different about the management element is not its cost, which depends entirely on your situation, but its subject: it is about how you work rather than what you built, so it can be improved without changing the premises.
The three elements, and what an app can do about each
The Food Standards Agency’s own guidance for businesses describes the three, and they are not equally software shaped. It is worth being blunt about which of them this app touches.
How hygienically food is handled
Preparing, cooking, re-heating, cooling and storing. The app holds the safe methods that describe your practice and records the cooking, cooling and chilling temperatures that show it happened. It cannot handle food for you: this element is won in the kitchen, and the records only evidence it.
The physical condition of the business
Cleanliness, layout, lighting, ventilation, pest control and other facilities. Honestly, an app does very little here. It carries a cleaning schedule and the pest control safe method, so the routine is written down and signed off, but no software fixes broken extraction or a bad layout.
How you manage keeping food safe
The guidance names processes, training and systems, and the officer judges from them how confident they are that standards will hold in future. All three are things the app carries: safe methods are the processes, the staff training record is the training, and the diary with its four-weekly review is the system running.
That is also the correction to a common shorthand, including an earlier version of this page: the third element is not only your records. It is how you work, and the records are how an officer sees it. A pack of perfect paperwork describing a process nobody follows is not a system, and an inspection is designed to find that out.
Source: the FSA’s Food Hygiene Rating Scheme guidance for businesses, which covers England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
What an officer can actually see
An officer cannot see the month you had. They can see what you wrote down about it, and they read it for whether it looks like a system that runs or a form that was filled in once.
The patterns that read badly are consistent, and none of them is about having a bad kitchen:
- A month of identical fridge readings in one handwriting, written in one sitting.
- Safe method sheets that nobody has signed or dated.
- No training record for staff who have been on shift for a year.
- A clean run of records that stops the week you went on holiday and never resumes.
- Nothing at all showing what happened the day something went wrong.
That last one is the opposite of what people expect. A record showing a fridge found warm, the stock moved, an engineer called and the temperature normal the next morning is stronger evidence than a month in which nothing ever went wrong, because it shows the system catching something.
Where to start, in order
You do not need the whole pack running perfectly before the next visit. You need a run of real records, and the ones below are the ones most often missing.
- Daily fridge and freezer temperatures. The single most asked for record, and the easiest to keep honestly if something reminds you. SC2, SC3 and SC4 explained.
- Opening and closing checks. A short list, twice a day, that shows the kitchen is started and shut down deliberately. What goes on the checks.
- Your safe methods, signed. The written half of the pack, which is a one off rather than a habit. All 31 safe methods.
- Staff training records. Who was shown what, and when. Frequently the only thing missing from an otherwise complete pack. The staff training record.
- The four-weekly review. The part that shows somebody reads the diary rather than only filling it in. The four-weekly review.
The three ways to respond to a rating
A rating stays as it is until the council acts, so records you start keeping today change nothing on the public register by themselves. Three responses are open to you and they are for different situations: two of them can change the rating and one deliberately cannot. All three go through the authority that inspected you, not through us and not through the Food Standards Agency.
- Appeal, if you believe the rating is wrong. Within 21 days of being told your rating, counting weekends and bank holidays. It is reviewed by an officer other than the one who gave it, and it does not automatically mean another visit: it can be decided on the record of the inspection you already had. You are told the outcome within 21 days. This is the one route that can change a rating without anybody coming back.
- Right to reply, if the rating is fair but the story is not. There is no deadline for this one. It is published next to your rating and lets you tell customers what has improved since, or about the circumstances at the time. It does not change the number.
- A re-rating visit, once you have put things right. Requested after you have accepted the rating and made the improvements that were needed, which is what the rest of this page is about. A fee applies in Wales, in Northern Ireland and at some English authorities.
The waiting times are published rather than promised. Wales and Northern Ireland aim to re-visit within three months of a written request. In England, where the authority does not charge, it is within six months if you ask within three months of the original inspection, and within three months if you ask after that.
Check them against your own council rather than this page. Every authority in our list of local authorities carries its own food safety contact details, which is the fastest way to reach the right team.
Scotland is a different scheme. The guidance above covers England, Wales and Northern Ireland, while Scotland runs the Food Hygiene Information Scheme, which publishes Pass or Improvement Required rather than a number.
Questions owners actually ask
Can an app improve my food hygiene rating?
No, and anything claiming otherwise is selling you something. Only your local authority can change a rating, at a re-rating visit or on appeal. What an app can do is make sure that when somebody looks, the records exist, are legible and cover the whole period rather than the week before the visit.
Which score should I work on first?
Start from the officer’s report, which says where the problems actually were. Where it is a toss-up, the management element is the one about how you work rather than what you built, so it does not wait on building work.
Is an appeal the same as asking for a new visit?
No, and the difference matters. An appeal is for a rating you believe is wrong, within 21 days of being notified, and a different officer may decide it on the existing inspection record without anybody visiting again. A re-rating visit is the opposite situation: you accept the rating, put the problems right, and ask somebody to come and see.
How long does a run of records need to be?
Long enough to cover the period an officer asks about, which is usually since the last visit. There is no shortcut: a fortnight of records produced after a poor rating is a fortnight of records.
Will my rating go up automatically if I keep better records?
No. Nothing happens until an officer looks again, at the next inspection or at a re-rating visit you have asked for. The records are what that visit finds, not what triggers it.
Does any of this cost money?
Keeping the records in this app does not. A re-rating visit carries a fee in Wales, in Northern Ireland and at some English authorities, so whether yours does is a question for your own council.
Keep reading
Keep the records, be ready for the visit
Free on iOS and Android, with the whole pack printable as one PDF.