Temperature control is the single most-checked element of any food hygiene inspection, and also the area where owners most often over-complicate what’s actually required. Here’s the real baseline.
The core temperature rules
- Chilled/high-risk food: stored at 8°C or below (many businesses target 5°C as a safer working buffer)
- Frozen food: -18°C or below
- Cooking: food should reach a core temperature of 75°C (or an equivalent time/temperature combination for slower cooking methods)
- Hot holding: food kept hot for service must stay above 63°C
- Cooling: cooked food that’s going to be chilled should be cooled quickly — as a guide, within 90 minutes — before refrigeration, to avoid a prolonged spell in the temperature “danger zone”
These aren’t arbitrary numbers — they’re the range in which harmful bacteria multiply fastest, and the whole point of temperature control is minimising the time food spends in it.
How often you actually need to log
There’s no single legally mandated frequency written into law — it’s risk-based, which is exactly why SFBB asks you to define your own safe method. In practice, most independent kitchens land on:
- Fridge/freezer temperatures: at least twice daily (opening and closing, or start/end of service)
- Core temperature checks on cooking: every relevant high-risk dish, not sampled occasionally
- Hot holding: periodically through service, not just once at the start
The right frequency is whatever lets you catch a problem before it becomes a food safety issue, not just whatever’s fastest to fill in.
What EHOs are really checking
It’s rarely just “was the fridge cold.” They’re checking whether your logged temperature genuinely matches an independent reading they take themselves, whether the pattern of readings looks real rather than copied, and whether a reading that’s ever gone out of range has a corresponding corrective action next to it.
Common mistakes
- Logging the fridge display reading instead of an actual probe check inside the food
- Recording temperatures at the same time every day regardless of when checks actually happened
- No follow-up recorded when a reading was borderline or out of range
- Probe thermometers that are never calibrated, so the reading itself can’t be trusted
Why manual logging quietly drifts
Even conscientious staff, under pressure during service, tend to round numbers, log late, or occasionally fill in a gap from memory rather than admit a check was missed. None of this is dishonesty — it’s just what happens when a manual process meets a busy kitchen, the same drift that shows up in any paper diary over time. The record ends up slightly less reliable than the reality.
Taking the guesswork out
A digital system that timestamps entries the moment they’re made, flags anything out of range instantly, and won’t let a check silently disappear removes almost all of this drift. Rated5 does exactly that, built around the FSA’s own temperature bands per UK nation rather than a generic one-size-fits-all rule. See how temperature logging works in Rated5.