An environmental health officer can arrive unannounced, and normally does. They will look at the kitchen, watch how it is being worked, and ask to see your food safety records. The rating that follows is not a general impression: it is built from three separate scores.
The three things scored
Under the Food Hygiene Rating Scheme, which runs in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, the officer scores three areas. Each is scored in demerit points, where zero is fully compliant and higher is worse, and the three together produce the rating from 0 to 5. Scotland uses a different scheme, the Food Hygiene Information Scheme, which publishes Pass or Improvement Required instead.
| What is scored | What it means |
|---|---|
| Hygienic food handling | How food is actually handled: cooking, reheating, cooling, chilling, and preventing cross-contamination. |
| Cleanliness and condition of facilities | The building and its equipment: layout, ventilation, lighting, handwashing facilities, and the state of the structure. |
| Management of food safety | Your system for keeping food safe, and the records showing it runs. This is the one your paperwork decides. |
The score your records decide
Two of the three scores describe the kitchen on the day. The third, management of food safety, is the officer’s judgement about whether the business can keep food safe reliably, and the evidence for it is almost entirely your written records.
This is the practical reason a digital diary is worth keeping. A kitchen can be spotless and still score badly on management if nobody can show the fridge temperatures for the last three months, the safe methods are unsigned, and the training records do not exist.
It also cuts the other way, and this is the part worth knowing: a record showing something went wrong and was dealt with is stronger evidence than a record showing nothing ever goes wrong. A fridge found warm, stock moved, an engineer called and the temperature back to normal the next morning is a system working. A month of identical readings written in one handwriting on one afternoon is not.
What to have ready
- The diary, with the opening and closing checks for the period since your last visit.
- Fridge and freezer temperatures, cooking and reheating temperatures, and hot holding records.
- Your safe methods, completed and signed, including the ones you marked as not applying.
- The cleaning schedule, and whatever shows it is being followed.
- Staff training records, one per person.
- The allergen chart, matching what is actually on sale today.
- Supplier details, and your records of what you have taken delivery of.
- Any incidents, and what you did about them.
Producing all of it at once
On paper this is a binder, and the binder is usually incomplete in one specific way: the parts that live somewhere else. Training certificates in the office, delivery notes in a drawer, the allergen chart on the wall.
In the app it is one export. Choose a date range and the EHO pack comes out as a single PDF: the diary for those dates, every temperature record, every completed safe method, the cleaning schedule, the training records and the allergen chart, each printed onto the FSA’s own form. The parts the FSA publishes no form for, the incident log, your deliveries and any checklists you built yourself, get a plain page of ours in the same pack. You can generate it while the officer is standing there, or email it afterwards.
Common questions
How far back do my records need to go?
Far enough to show the system running, which in practice means since your last inspection. Keeping them for longer costs nothing digitally, and the four-weekly reviews are what tie the period together.
Are digital records acceptable to an EHO?
Yes. What matters is that the records are genuine, contemporaneous, attributable to a named person, and that you can produce them when asked. A phone you can hand over or export from meets that.
Does a good pack raise my rating on its own?
It cannot fix a dirty kitchen, and nobody should suggest it does. It directly affects one of the three scores, which is the one most often lost for reasons that have nothing to do with how carefully the business actually works.
What if I have a gap in my records?
Leave it as a gap. Filling it in retrospectively is falsification, and an officer who spots it will trust nothing else in the pack. A gap you can explain is a much smaller problem.
Can I appeal a rating I think is wrong?
Yes. There is a right to reply, and a re-rating visit can be requested once you have put the issues right. Speak to the local authority that carried out the inspection.
Keep reading
The whole pack, one PDF
Free on iOS and Android, on the FSA’s own forms.
