The Food Safety AppThe incident log, and why a problem on the record helps you
The pack does ask about problems: the official diary gives each day a box reading "Any problems? What did you do?". What it has no separate form for is the incident itself, with room for what you changed afterwards, the method it touched and a photograph. One line in a daily box is not much to show for the morning the fridge failed.
Free to use. No ads, no paywalls.
The daily diary already carries a line about problems, and the app writes into it: whatever you typed in "Any problems or changes?" goes onto the form, followed by any opening or closing check marked not met, so a day signed off with a problem cannot present as a clean one.
What SFBB publishes no separate form for is the incident, and a line in a daily box cannot hold one. So this is a plain page of ours, shaped the way the pack shapes its safe methods: what went wrong, what you did about it, and what you changed so it does not happen again.
Why a recorded problem reads well
This is the part that surprises people. A month of records in which nothing ever went wrong is weaker evidence than a month containing one failure that was caught, handled and prevented, because the first describes a kitchen nobody was watching closely and the second describes a system working.
Inspection day and the records behind your rating goes into why the management element is read that way. The practical consequence is that an incident log is worth keeping even when it makes uncomfortable reading.
What one entry holds
- The date it happened.
- What happened.
- What you did about it at the time.
- What you changed so it does not recur.
- The initials of whoever dealt with it.
- The safe method it relates to, so the entry sits with the practice it tested.
- A photograph, where one says it better.
A photograph is evidence prose is not
A line reading "chiller found at 12 °C" is a claim. A photograph of the display reading 12 °C, taken at the time, is the thing itself, and the printed log embeds it next to the entry rather than leaving it on somebody’s phone.
It is also the part of an incident people are most likely to capture anyway, in the moment, before they have decided whether it is worth writing up.
Questions
Does SFBB require an incident log?
The pack does not print one, and your own food safety management system decides what you keep, with your local authority having the final say. The safe methods do ask what you would do when things go wrong, so a log is the record of having actually done it.
Will logging a problem count against me?
An officer is assessing whether your system catches problems, so a caught and corrected problem is evidence that it does. An unlogged incident that an inspection uncovers some other way is the version that hurts.
What counts as an incident?
Anything the kitchen had to react to: a chiller or freezer out of range, a pest sighting, a delivery turned away, a customer reaction, a power cut, a flood. If somebody had to decide something, it is worth an entry.
Is it in the inspection pack?
Yes, as one block per incident with the photograph embedded, printed in the same export as the diary and the official forms.
Keep reading
Keep the bad days too
Free on iOS and Android, photographs included.