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Seven HACCP Logs Your EHO Will Ask For
Seven food safety records stand between you and a difficult EHO visit. Here is what to keep and how to ditch the paper mountain.
An Environmental Health Officer walked into a small café last February. She did not ask about the hygiene rating certificate on the door or the cleaning rota pinned to the wall. She asked for the fridge temperature log from the previous fortnight. The owner found a clipboard with eleven days of entries missing.
That is the gap. Not ignorance of what HACCP is, but the daily friction of actually recording it, especially when you are running a small kitchen with two members of staff and a lunch rush.
What HACCP actually means in a small kitchen
HACCP, Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points, is a systematic approach to identifying where food safety risks occur in your process and controlling them. For a large manufacturer that is a complex set of documents. For a small café or kitchen it boils down to knowing where things can go wrong, checking them regularly, and keeping proof that you did.
The proof is what trips people up.
The seven records your EHO wants to see
Environmental Health Officers follow Safer Food Better Business guidance. They are not trying to catch you out. But when something goes wrong, a record is the difference between a warning and a prosecution. Here are the seven logs an EHO will typically ask about.
Fridge and freezer temperatures. Twice daily checks, below 8°C for fridges and below -18°C for freezers. One log per unit, every day you are open.
Cooking temperatures. Core temperature records for high-risk foods. Poultry to 75°C minimum. Record the time, the food, and the probe reading.
Hot holding and cooling. If you are holding cooked food above 63°C for service, or cooling it down for storage, that needs its own record. Time and temperature both.
Delivery checks. Temperature and condition of incoming goods on arrival. Date, supplier, any rejections noted and why.
Cleaning schedule. What was cleaned, when, by whom, and with what product. Daily contact surfaces through to weekly deep cleans on equipment.
Pest control. Not necessarily a daily log, but records of routine inspections, contractor visits, and any sightings or evidence.
Staff training records. Who has completed food hygiene training, at what level, and on what date. Inductions count here too.
That is the core of it. Seven areas of evidence. Not seven hundred pages.
Why paper breaks down
Paper works in theory. In practice, the clipboard ends up under a pile of delivery notes, the pen has gone missing, and the afternoon checks get filled in from memory at closing time. By the third week the log is patchy. By the time an EHO visit happens, you are scrambling to explain the gaps.
The fix is not complicated software with a monthly subscription. It is a set of simple, pre-built digital forms that your staff can complete on a phone or tablet in under a minute, then save without printing anything.
A ready-made pack worth looking at
SafetyDeskStudio’s Food Safety and HACCP Pack on Etsy is a practical option for small cafés and kitchen operations. It covers the templates you would expect: fridge logs, cooking temperature records, cleaning schedules, and delivery checks. Pre-formatted, straightforward to adapt to your own menu and setup, one-off purchase with no ongoing fees.
It will not replace a full HACCP assessment for a complex production operation, but for a café, a pop-up, or a small commercial kitchen it gets you from nothing to compliant in an afternoon.
Keeping it going after the visit
The hardest part of food safety compliance is not setting up the system. It is maintaining it on a busy Tuesday when two people have called in sick and the delivery is running late.
The kitchens that stay compliant tend to have one thing in common: the records are part of the opening and closing routine, not an afterthought. Fifteen minutes at the start of the day, five at the end. It becomes habit, and then it stops feeling like a burden.
If you are working through operational discipline in other parts of the business, the same logic applies. The diagnostics tool at cadencestandard.com helps identify where the gaps tend to sit across a wider operation. And if you are thinking about process losses more broadly, the losses calculator is worth a few minutes of your time.
Food safety is not glamorous work. Neither is keeping the fridge log up to date. But an EHO visit with everything in order is a very quiet morning. The alternative is not.