A food safety checklist that works is the HACCP plan turned into lines: each critical control point as a daily check with its limit, and each prerequisite, cleaning, hand-washing, pests, date labels, as a line too. Then, monthly, the audit walk of the three areas the inspector scores. 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 Food Standards Agency's cooking-your-food guidance, cited below, gives the danger zone as between 8 and 63°C, where bacterial growth occurs, and says leftovers must be cooled and put in the fridge within two hours and eaten within 48 hours. The food safety audit checklist on this site prints the monthly walk, and the temperature log planner prints the daily lines, both free and without an account.
The daily lines, from the critical control points
Fridges and freezers read; cooking temperatures probed and recorded; cooling started and finished within the plan's time; hot holding read at service; reheating probed; deliveries checked and recorded; date labels applied; hand-wash basins stocked; the allergen matrix current. Each with initials.
The weekly lines
The premises walked: structure, cleanliness, pests, equipment, storage, waste. The week's records read for blanks and misses, because a blank found on Friday is fixed before an inspector finds it. The cleaning schedule signed off.
The monthly audit
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 checklist walks the three areas with the records for each, so the third, management of food safety, is rehearsed.
The completed checklists as records
Every completed checklist is evidence that the routine ran on that day. ProbeLedger Pro keeps them with the temperature records and the plan; the free tools print each. 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 safety checklist
How is this different from the HACCP plan?
The plan says what is controlled and how; the checklist is the plan's monitoring in a form that gets ticked.
Who owns the checklist?
The plan owner sets it; whoever is on shift completes it with initials.
Is it free?
Yes, without an account.