The Food Safety AppThe pack, in the language your kitchen actually speaks
The person filling in the diary is often not the person who downloaded the app. A British commercial kitchen is one of the most multilingual workplaces there is, and a pack nobody on shift can read is a pack that gets filled in from memory on a Friday.
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The whole SFBB pack is translated: the diary, the safe method sheets, the questions each one asks, the guidance beside them, and the reminders that arrive on the phone. Not a menu of a few labels, the pack itself.
A handful of screens outside the pack are still English only, mostly on the side that looks up other businesses’ ratings rather than runs your own: checking a place, a place’s own page, and the feedback form. They are being migrated screen by screen, and the pack came first on purpose.
Five languages beside English
| Language | In the app |
|---|---|
| Polish | Polski |
| Romanian | Română |
| Punjabi | ਪੰਜਾਬੀ |
| Italian | Italiano |
| Simplified Chinese | 简体中文 |
Each is a choice per person rather than per business, so a kitchen can run the diary in Polish while the owner reads the same records in English on their own phone. Nothing about the record changes; only the language it is shown in.
What stays in English, deliberately
Every PDF the app produces is English. The diary, the safe methods, the temperature records, the whole inspection pack: all of it prints in English whatever language the kitchen works in.
That is not an oversight, it is the point. The reader of those pages is an environmental health officer, and a pack they cannot read helps nobody. So the kitchen works in its own language and the officer gets the records in theirs, out of the same entries.
Two things are not the form, though. Reminders go the other way: they arrive in the language the phone is set to, and fall back to English if a particular reminder has not been translated yet. And anything a member of staff types prints exactly as they typed it, in whatever language they wrote it, because nothing rewrites somebody’s own account of what happened. If you want the officer to read those notes, write them in English.
Switching, and what arrives without an update
The language list is in the app, and changing it takes effect immediately. It is also live: a new language, or an improvement to one already there, can arrive without waiting for an app store update, because the dictionaries are delivered separately from the app itself.
In practice that means a correction somebody reports can reach every phone in days rather than at the next release.
If your language is not there
Ask for it in the app. The language list has a way to tell us which language you want, and those requests are the only thing that decides what we translate next: the five above were chosen from what people actually asked for and from what the register says about who runs food businesses here, not from a list of big languages.
Questions
Will my inspector see the records in my language?
The form itself, no: the headings, the labels, the dates and the printed questions are English on purpose, because the officer reading them needs them to be. What you type is a different matter and worth knowing: a note you write about a problem prints exactly as you typed it, in whatever language you wrote it, because nothing rewrites your own words. So if you want the officer to read your notes, write those in English.
Does each member of staff choose their own language?
Yes. It is a setting on the phone, not on the business, so the same diary can be filled in by somebody working in Polish and read by somebody working in English.
Are the safe method sheets translated, or just the app?
The sheets too, including the questions each one asks and the guidance with them. The printed version goes onto the FSA’s own English form.
Do the reminders come in my language?
Yes, where that language’s reminder wording has been published, and in English otherwise. The app never withholds a reminder because a translation is missing.
My language is not listed. What now?
Ask for it from the language list in the app. Those requests are what decides the next one.
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Your kitchen’s language, your inspector’s English
Free on iOS and Android, in five languages beside English.