food-safety-diary

---
name: food-safety-diary
description: Turns your kitchen's real day into the daily record an environmental health officer asks to see, with the opening and closing checks written as things a person can actually observe, every exception recorded with what was done about it, and a four weekly review that proves somebody is reading it. Use when your diary is blank, back-filled, or full of ticks that would not survive a question.
---

# The daily record that answers the officer's first question

You give me how your kitchen really runs: what time the first person walks in, which fridges and freezers you have and where, what you cook and chill and reheat, who opens and who locks up, and whatever you keep now, even if that is a wall planner with three weeks of ticks or a phone photo of a probe reading. You get back a diary designed around your actual day, an opening checklist and a closing checklist written so each line can be seen and not guessed, an exception log with the wording for the things that go wrong in real kitchens, a four weekly review page, and a filing rule so that when an officer asks for a date, the day reconstructs.

## What it does

1. **Start from what the diary is for, which is evidence, not tidiness.** Your legal duty is not "keep a diary". Retained Regulation (EC) No 852/2004, Article 5(1), says "Food business operators shall put in place, implement and maintain a permanent procedure or procedures based on the HACCP principles", and Article 5(2)(g) makes one of those principles "establishing documents and records commensurate with the nature and size of the food business to demonstrate the effective application of the measures". The diary is how a small kitchen does the demonstrating. GOV.UK puts the same point in the owner's language: "If your business is involved in a food safety incident, you will need to show your records as evidence of how you keep food safe." So the test for every line you are about to add is one question: if something went wrong on a Tuesday, would this line help me show what we actually did that Tuesday. A line that fails that test is work you will do every day for nothing, and it will still be blank by week three.

2. **Write the opening checks as things that can be seen, with a number or a name attached.** "Fridges OK" is not a record, because it is true whether anybody looked or not. Turn each one into an observation: the display reading on each unit, written down, unit by unit, named the way your staff name them ("under-bar", "chef fridge", "walk-in", "dessert freezer"). Add the ones that are looked at rather than measured: yesterday's cooked food covered, dated and still in date; no raw meat above ready to eat food; probe wiped and working; hot water at the wash hand basin; soap and blue roll present; no evidence of pests; bins emptied. Cap the opening list at eight to twelve lines. Longer than that and it becomes a tick exercise done in the car park, which is worse than no list because it is a record that says you checked when you did not. Put the name of the person doing it and the time at the top, not at the bottom, because that is the order they will do it in.

3. **Write closing checks around the things that only fail overnight.** These are different checks, not the opening list repeated. Cooked food cooled and in the fridge within the time you have set, with the actual time it went in. Nothing left out on the pass or the bar. Surfaces and equipment cleaned to the schedule, with the deep clean item for that day named. Fridge and freezer doors shut and units running. Waste out and bin area closed. Probe cleaned. Delivery due tomorrow and who is in to receive it. The Safer Food, Better Business pack, which the Food Standards Agency publishes for exactly this size of business, groups the work as "cross-contamination, cleaning, chilling, cooking, management, using the diary", and a good closing list is mostly cleaning and chilling. Eight lines is plenty. Make the last line a signature, because the person who locks up is the person who is accountable for the state you open in.

4. **Build the exception log, and make it the part you are proud of.** A diary of unbroken ticks is the one an officer trusts least, because no kitchen has a perfect month. What builds confidence is a record showing a problem was spotted, something was done, and somebody checked it held. So the exception log has four columns and no fewer: what was found (with the reading or the observation), what was done about it straight away, who decided, and what was done to stop it happening again. Article 5(2)(e) of the retained regulation calls this "establishing corrective actions when monitoring indicates that a critical control point is not under control", and your log is that, written in kitchen English. Real entries look like: "walk-in reading 10C at 07:40, moved dairy and cooked meats to under-bar, called engineer 07:55, unit back at 4C by 11:20, contents at 10C for under two hours so kept, gasket replaced 16 Sept". Write the two lines you expect to need most often and leave them as examples, so the first person to find a problem has a model to copy at seven in the morning.

5. **Fill it at the moment, because back-filling is visible and it is the thing that loses you the rating.** A week of entries in one pen, one handwriting, one pressure, all seven days identical, is read for what it is. Set the diary down where the check happens: by the walk-in door, not in the office. If you use a phone or tablet, that is fine and the Food Standards Agency says so directly, offering a choice to "keep an electronic diary" or "print the diary and fill it in", but the same rule applies: entered at the fridge, not at home at eleven at night. Agree one rule with the team out loud: if the check did not happen, the line stays empty and somebody writes why. An honest gap with a reason ("closed, staff training day") costs you nothing. A tick for a check nobody did is a false record, and if anyone is ever ill it is the document that gets read aloud.

6. **Do the four weekly review, and make it change something.** Every four weeks, sit with the last four weeks of pages and do three things. Count the gaps and name them. Read the exception log and look for the same fault twice, because a fridge that has drifted three times is a fridge that is going to fail on a Saturday. Then write two or three lines saying what you are changing: an engineer booked, a delivery slot moved, a line added to the opening list, a person retrained on cooling. Sign and date it. This is what Article 5(2)(f) asks for, "establishing procedures, which shall be carried out regularly, to verify that the measures outlined in subparagraphs (a) to (e) are working effectively", and it is also the single page most likely to move an officer's view of you, because it is proof that somebody is reading the diary rather than feeding it.

7. **Attach the things that live outside the diary, and list them on one page.** Officers do not only ask for daily pages. Keep, and index: your cleaning schedule with what is done daily, weekly and monthly; your supplier list with what each one delivers; delivery notes or a delivery record showing the state and temperature of chilled goods on arrival; probe calibration checks with dates; staff training records with names, dates and what the training covered; and the written food safety management system itself, whether that is the Safer Food, Better Business pack or your own. The front of the diary carries a one page index saying where each of those lives, in words a stranger could follow: "training certificates, blue folder, office shelf". A record that exists but cannot be produced in the four minutes the officer is standing there does you very little good.

8. **File it so a date can be found, and keep it until you have been visited.** Pages in date order, month per wallet, year per box, nothing loose. The Food Standards Agency is specific about how long: "Store all your completed diary pages safely until your next visit from a local authority food safety officer." Article 5(4) puts a further duty on you in three parts: "provide the competent authority with evidence of their compliance with paragraph 1 in the manner that the competent authority requires, taking account of the nature and size of the food business", "ensure that any documents describing the procedures developed in accordance with this Article are up-to-date at all times", and "retain any other documents and records for an appropriate period". Nobody defines "appropriate" for you, so ask your environmental health officer or food safety adviser what period they expect for your business and write their answer on the front of the box rather than guessing it.

9. **Rehearse the inspection with one random date.** Pick a day from six weeks ago at random and try to answer, out loud, from the paper only: who opened, what the walk-in read, what was cooked and cooled and when it went in the fridge, whether anything went wrong, who locked up. Time yourself. If it takes more than three minutes, or if any answer is "it would have been fine", the diary is not yet doing its job and the fix is in whichever line you could not answer from. This rehearsal is also the honest way to see your own rating exposure: the Food Hygiene Rating Scheme guidance for businesses says the officer checks three elements, one of which is "How you manage ways of keeping food safe, looking at processes, training, and systems to ensure good hygiene is maintained", and that "you must do well in all three elements" for the top rating. The diary is the visible half of that element.

## Then it checks

1. Every opening and closing line is an observation with a number, a name or a yes and no that a second person standing in the kitchen could confirm. No line reads "OK", "fine", "as usual" or "checked".
2. Every refrigeration and freezer unit on the premises appears by the name the staff use, and the count of named units matches the count of units you listed at the start. No unit is missing, including the drinks fridge and the outside freezer.
3. The exception log has at least one worked example filled in for each of the two most likely failures in this kitchen, each with all four columns completed, including the "stop it happening again" column.
4. The four weekly review page has space for a gap count, a repeat fault, a named change, a signature and a date, and none of those five is optional.
5. The index page names a physical or digital location for the cleaning schedule, supplier list, delivery records, probe calibration, training records and the written food safety management system. Any item with no location is listed as missing rather than left blank.
6. The random date rehearsal reconstructs the day in under three minutes using only the pages, and the retention period on the front of the box is a date given by a named adviser or officer, not an assumption.

Any check fails: name it, redo that step once. Failed twice: say what is wrong and stop.

## Rules
- Public information only.
- Never invent a fact, a number or a quote.
- Anything sent in someone's name says whose name it is.
- Never write an entry for a check that was not made, and never fill in a past date. A back-filled diary is a false record: it converts an ordinary bad week into a document that undermines everything true beside it, and every officer knows what one pen across seven days looks like.
- Never state that a particular temperature, time, method or retention period makes a business compliant. Quote the source, say who published it, and hand the decision to the owner's environmental health officer or food safety adviser, because the controls that are right depend on what this kitchen actually does.
- Never treat the Safer Food, Better Business pack as the law. It is one published way of meeting the duty in Article 5 of retained Regulation (EC) No 852/2004, it is written for England and Wales, and a business may meet the same duty with its own system.
- This output is a working document prepared for the owner's environmental health officer, food safety adviser or local authority to check before it is relied on. It is not legal advice and it does not determine whether a business complies with food hygiene law.

## Built from
- Legislation.gov.uk, "Regulation (EC) No 852/2004 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 29 April 2004 on the hygiene of foodstuffs, Article 5", https://www.legislation.gov.uk/eur/2004/852/article/5, retained EU legislation as it applies in the UK, read 14 September 2026: the duty in 5(1), the record-keeping principle in 5(2)(g), corrective actions in 5(2)(e) and verification in 5(2)(f), which shaped steps 1, 4 and 6, and the three limbs of 5(4) that shaped the retention wording in step 8.
- GOV.UK / Food Standards Agency, "Safer food, better business (SFBB)", https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/safer-food-better-business-sfbb/safer-food-better-business-sfbb, published 5 June 2025, read 14 September 2026: the pack's grouping of the work, the instruction that daily records are kept in the diary, the electronic-or-printed choice in step 5, and the storage rule quoted in step 8.
- GOV.UK, "Food safety management systems", https://www.gov.uk/food-safety-management-systems, no publication date shown on the page, read 14 September 2026: the description of a food safety management system as a written set of processes, checks, rules and records, and the incident sentence that sets the test used in step 1.
- GOV.UK / Food Standards Agency, "Food Hygiene Rating Scheme (FHRS): guidance for businesses", https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/food-hygiene-rating-scheme-fhrs-guidance-for-businesses/food-hygiene-rating-scheme-fhrs-guidance-for-businesses, updated 30 June 2026, read 14 September 2026: the three elements checked at inspection and the requirement to do well in all three, which is why step 9 rehearses the management element rather than the kitchen's appearance.

# food-safety-diary

## You are given
A short description of one UK food business: its name, what it is (pub, cafe, restaurant, hotel, takeaway, bakery), opening and closing times, the names staff use for every fridge and freezer on the premises, whether it cooks and cools food in advance, and who opens and who locks up. If any of that is missing, ask for it once, then proceed with whatever you were given and write "NOT SUPPLIED" in the cell rather than inventing it.

## Produce
Write into a folder named `food-safety-diary-<business-slug>`:

1. `opening-checks.csv` - columns exactly: `Line no,Check,What to write down,Unit or area,Pass criteria`. One row per check, 8 to 12 rows. One row per named fridge and freezer, each recording a display reading in degrees Celsius. No row may read "OK" or "checked" in the `What to write down` column; it must name a number, a name or an observable yes/no.
2. `closing-checks.csv` - same columns, 6 to 10 rows, covering cooling with the time food went into the fridge, cleaning to schedule with that day's deep clean item named, doors shut, waste out, probe cleaned, and a final signature row.
3. `exception-log.csv` - columns exactly: `Date,Time,What was found,Immediate action taken,Who decided,Action to prevent recurrence,Checked by,Date checked`. Include two pre-filled example rows marked `EXAMPLE` in the Date column, using faults realistic for this business.
4. `four-weekly-review.csv` - columns exactly: `Review period start,Review period end,Days with missing entries,Faults seen more than once,Change being made,Owner signature,Date signed`. One blank row ready to complete.
5. `document-index.csv` - columns exactly: `Document,Where it is kept,Last updated,Who is responsible`. Rows for: cleaning schedule, supplier list, delivery records, probe calibration checks, staff training records, written food safety management system, allergen information.
6. `diary-week.html` - a printable A4 landscape page, one week per sheet, containing the opening and closing checks down the left and Monday to Sunday across, with a signature and time box per day. Plain black on white, no colour fills, 11pt minimum, margins at least 10mm. It must print on one sheet per week.
7. `README.txt` - under 300 words: how to use the four CSVs and the printable page, where to hang it, and the retention line below.

## Rules
- British English. No em dash characters anywhere; use a comma, a full stop, or " - " with spaces. No emoji.
- Invent no temperature, time or retention period. Where a number depends on the business, write `ASK YOUR EHO` in the cell.
- Never pre-tick, pre-date or pre-fill any check row other than the two rows explicitly marked `EXAMPLE`.
- Every CSV is UTF-8 with a header row, comma separated, quoted where a field contains a comma.
- `README.txt` must end with: "This is a working document prepared for the owner's environmental health officer, food safety adviser or local authority to check before it is relied on. It is not legal advice."

## Return
The folder path, a list of the seven filenames with row counts for each CSV, the number of named fridge and freezer units covered, and any field you left as `NOT SUPPLIED` or `ASK YOUR EHO`.