Every food business in the EU must keep food safety procedures based on HACCP principles. This is set out in Article 5 of Regulation (EC) No 852/2004. For a small restaurant or café, it comes down to two things: a written plan for how you keep food safe, and daily records that show your team follows it.
Your national rules and your local food authority set the details, including the exact temperature limits. The structure below works in any European kitchen.
Part 1: the HACCP plan
The plan follows the route food takes through your kitchen. For each step, you write down five things:
- Hazard: what could make the food unsafe at this step
- Control: what you do to prevent it
- Critical limit: the measurable value the food has to meet
- Monitoring: how often you check, and who checks
- Corrective action: what you do when a check fails
A typical restaurant has eight or nine steps: delivery, chilled and frozen storage, dry storage, preparation, cooking, cooling, reheating, hot holding and service. Leave out the steps you don't have and add any you do, such as sous vide or raw fish.
One step worked through: cooling
| Hazard | Bacteria and spores growing while food cools slowly |
| Control | Shallow trays, small batches, an ice bath or a blast chiller |
| Critical limit | 8 °C or below within 90 minutes |
| Monitoring | The cook probes the food when cooling starts and when it ends |
| Corrective action | Discard food that missed the limit and cool smaller batches next time |
Cooling deserves extra attention. A large pot of stock put straight into the fridge stays warm for hours and raises the temperature of everything around it.
Part 2: the daily records
The records show the plan works in practice. These are the ones an inspector usually asks for:
- Fridge and freezer temperatures at opening and close
- Deliveries: temperature, packaging and dates checked on arrival
- Cooking and reheating: core temperatures
- Cooling: times and temperatures at the start and the end
- Hot holding: temperature every two hours
- Probe thermometer: a monthly check in iced and boiling water
- Cleaning: daily, weekly and monthly tasks, initialled when done
- Pest control: weekly checks and contractor visits
- Staff: fitness to work after illness, and training records
- Corrective actions: what went wrong and what you did about it
Common limits in European kitchens
| Check | Common guidance |
|---|---|
| Fridges | 5 °C or below |
| Freezers | −18 °C or below |
| Chilled deliveries | Reject above 8 °C |
| Cooking | Core 75 °C, or an equivalent such as 70 °C for 2 minutes |
| Reheating | Core 75 °C or above, once only |
| Hot holding | 63 °C or above |
| Cooling | 8 °C or below within 90 minutes |
Some countries and regions set different figures. Confirm each one with your food authority and write your own limits into your plan.
Three habits that keep the records reliable
- Write the actual reading. 4.2 °C shows the check was made and what it found.
- Act on the same line. A reading outside the limit gets the action written next to it, and a line on the corrective action log.
- Sign off every week. A manager reads each sheet, signs it and follows up anything still open.
The plan and the logs, ready to use
The Food Safety Logs pack includes a HACCP plan template with the hazard analysis worked through for a typical restaurant kitchen, 13 printable logs for the kitchen clipboard, and an Excel workbook that checks every reading against your limits and gives you a monthly summary of checks and open issues.
Related
- Read: Standard Recipe Cards: What to Include
- Read: How to Set Prep Par Levels
- Also useful: Equipment Maintenance Log, service dates and repairs for the fridges you log every day
Every template in Restaurant Notes is in the Complete Restaurant Collection: 25 tools in one download.