Safer Food Better Business: Records and the Digital Diary

What the SFBB diary has to show, how often each check is done, whether you can keep it on a phone or tablet, and how it feeds into your food hygiene rating.

Yes, you can keep your Safer Food Better Business diary on a phone, tablet or computer. The Food Standards Agency says so directly: you can "keep an electronic diary – download the diary pages onto your device, fill them in and store them electronically." Councils say the same. Westminster, Kensington and Chelsea and Birmingham all tell businesses that electronic records are fine.

What an officer cares about is what the diary shows, not what it's written on. Five things:

A manager has signed off every day to say the opening and closing checks were done and the safe methods were followed.
When something went wrong, there's a note of what happened and what you did.
Extra checks were recorded each week.
There's a four-weekly review, even when nothing went wrong.
The officer can see all of this during the inspection, at the premises.

What SFBB is

Safer Food Better Business (SFBB) is the FSA's free food safety management pack for small businesses in England and Wales. The caterers' version has sections on cross-contamination, cleaning, chilling, cooking and management, followed by the diary. There are also versions for retailers and for Indian and Chinese cuisine, and a Welsh-language edition. Scotland's equivalent is CookSafe. Northern Ireland uses Safe Catering.

It exists because of one legal requirement. Article 5 of Regulation 852/2004 says every food business must "put in place, implement and maintain a permanent procedure or procedures based on the HACCP principles", with "documents and records commensurate with the nature and size of the food business". A full HACCP plan is a lot for a café or a three-site burger group. SFBB is the FSA's simplified way of meeting the same requirement, and the Food Law Practice Guidance says that implementing it properly counts as complying with Article 5.

You don't have to use SFBB. Your own HACCP-based system is fine if it suits your business. But SFBB is what most officers expect to see in a small kitchen, and the FHRS scoring guidance names it as an example of procedures that fit a small business.

What goes in the diary

The SFBB diary section has six parts:

week-to-view diary pages
checks to do every day when you open and close
the four-weekly review
a staff training record
a list of suppliers
a cleaning schedule

Every day

The manager signs each day against a line that reads "Our safe methods were followed and effectively supervised today." The FSA reckons the diary takes "about one minute a day". That's true only when the checks behind the signature were actually done.

The SFBB opening checks include fridges, chilled displays and freezers working properly, the probe thermometer working, hot water available, no signs of pests, and allergen information being accurate. Closing checks include throwing away food past its use-by date and confirming that your "prove it" checks have been recorded. Those are the readings that show your methods work, such as the core temperature of a cooked dish. Our guide to UK food temperature rules covers the readings and the limits.

When something goes wrong, the FSA's instruction is: "make a note in the diary of what happened and what you did." A fridge reading 9°C, a delivery sent back, a staff member sent home with sickness. That note is worth more than a page of ticks.

Every week

Each week has a box for extra checks you've done that week, such as a deep clean, a pest check by your contractor or a probe calibration.

Every four weeks

The four-weekly review is where you look back and spot patterns. The FSA's wording: "If you had a serious problem, or the same thing went wrong three times or more, make a note of it here." It also says the review "requires completion even if no problems have been found." It asks specific questions, such as whether probes have been calibrated in the last four weeks and the results recorded.

Training and suppliers

"Make a note on the Staff training record in the diary every time you train a member of staff," SFBB says. Keep the supplier list current, so you can show where each ingredient came from.

Keeping it digitally: what councils say

There's no approved list of apps. None of the councils we checked publishes criteria for one. Officers judge electronic records the same way as paper ones: do they exist, are they complete, and do they match what they can see in the kitchen?

What councils have published is short and practical:

Westminster describes "an electronic diary you can use to evidence" your food safety management, and says you will need to show it to the Environmental Health Officer.
Kensington and Chelsea says businesses can keep and complete records on a computer or print them out.
Birmingham adds the condition that matters most: if you store records electronically, they must be available both to staff and to the officers carrying out the inspection.

That last point catches people out. If the records live in the general manager's email or on a laptop in head office, the duty manager on a Tuesday morning can't show them. Whatever you use, someone on site has to be able to open it in front of the officer.

From what we've seen, digital records convince an officer when they show who did each check, when they did it, and what the reading was. They're also hard to fill in afterwards, and they flag problems rather than hiding them. A tablet full of identical readings ticked off at 11 p.m. is no better than a paper diary filled in the same way.

How long to keep the records

The FSA says to keep completed diary pages "until your next visit from a local authority food safety officer". For supplier records, SFBB suggests keeping them until you're sure the food they refer to has been eaten without any problems. Article 5 itself only says "for an appropriate period", so if your council has asked for longer, do what it says.

How the diary affects your hygiene rating

The diary is the main evidence for the confidence in management score, one of the three scores behind your food hygiene rating. The FHRS Brand Standard ties the scores almost directly to record keeping:

0 (best): procedures appropriate for the size and nature of the business ("e.g. SFBB"), with records maintained.
5: records "generally maintained – but some minor deficiencies/gaps".
10: records with "some deficiencies/gaps identified". A 10 here caps your rating at 4.

The difference between a 5 rating and a 4 is often a few blank days in the diary and a four-weekly review that was never done.

Running SFBB across several sites

Each premises is registered and rated on its own, so each needs its own diary. Write the group's safe methods once, then adapt them for each kitchen's menu and equipment. A site with a rotisserie needs a method the others don't.

Two habits make the biggest difference across a group:

Read the four-weekly reviews centrally. If the same fridge problem appears at three sites, it's an equipment or supplier issue, not a local one.
Check the diaries yourself before an officer does. Pick a random week at each site once a month. Look for gaps, identical readings and problems with no note of what was done. Our opening checklist and closing checklist show how to break the daily checks down by station.

This guide explains the FSA's Safer Food Better Business pack. It isn't legal advice. Your council's food team has the final word on what your business needs.