A food audit is the walk a business does before the inspector's, over the same three areas and with the same question: what would they find. The Food Hygiene Rating Scheme guidance, cited below, says 5 is top of the scale, meaning the hygiene standards are very good and fully comply with the law, and 0 is at the bottom, meaning urgent improvement is necessary; the inspector looks at how hygienically the food is handled, the physical condition of the business, and how the business manages ways of keeping food safe, looking at processes, training and systems. The audit checks the handling, the premises and, above all, the records, because the records are where a well-run kitchen most often has a gap. The food safety audit checklist on this site prints the walk, free and without an account; the paid product keeps the completed audits.
Handling
Watch the processes against the plan: is the probe used at cooking, is cooling timed, are raw and ready-to-eat separated, is the hot counter reading in limit. The same guidance gives the cooking standard as 70°C for 2 minutes, or the equivalents it lists, 75°C for 30 seconds among them. The checklist's handling lines are the plan's critical control points.
Premises
Cleanliness, structure, pest control, equipment condition, hand-washing facilities, waste. The lines the business can see and fix before the visit. The audit walks them room by room, and the fails become the week's cleaning list.
Management of food safety
The plan is current and matches the menu; the temperature records exist for every trading day; the corrective actions are recorded; the allergen matrix is dated; the probe calibration is recorded; training is recorded. The gov.uk guidance for food businesses, cited below, says a food safety management system must meet the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point principles, and describes critical control points as the points when you need to prevent, remove or reduce a hazard in your work process. Each is a line on the checklist with a pass, a fail or a gap.
How often, and what happens to the result
Monthly is a common rhythm, and always before a known inspection or after a change of menu or staff. The completed audit is itself a verification record in the HACCP system. ProbeLedger Pro keeps the audits with the records they checked. FoodDocs lists its Lite plan at $99 per site per month billed monthly or $79 billed annually, and its Standard plan at $199 per site per month, with a free 14-day trial, on its pricing page cited below. ProbeLedger Pro is $49 per month for the whole site.
Questions people ask about food audit
Is a food audit the same as an inspection?
The inspection is the local authority's; the audit is the business's rehearsal of it.
Who should do the audit?
The person responsible for food safety, honestly; an audit that finds nothing has not looked.
Is the checklist free?
Yes, without an account.