What do I need to do?
All food businesses are required by law to have a food safety management system in place in order to identify potential food hazards. You must then decide which of these hazards need to be controlled to make sure food is safe, put in place effective control and monitoring procedures to stop the hazards causing harm to consumers and keep written records of your monitoring. This system is sometimes referred to as a HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points).
Your hazard analysis system should be reviewed every year and whenever you make any changes to your business for example to your menu or equipment.
Advice and guidance
The Food Standards Agency (FSA) has developed a range of food safety management packs for different sectors of the food industry to help food business operators manage their food safety management procedures.
Safer Food, Better Business
One of the main systems used is a pack called Safer Food Better Business which helps small businesses with food safety management procedures. There are a number of SFBB packs available that are designed to meet the specific needs of different food businesses (retail, caterers, childminders, different cuisines) all of which can be downloaded and printed from the Food Standards Agency’s website.
My HACCP
The FSA has also recently introduced a new MyHACCP tool is intended to support small food manufacturing businesses develop their HACCP based food safety management system. It guides you through a step-by-step process to identify food safety hazards and controls and provides you with a downloadable Adobe PDF output of your HACCP study and HACCP based controls.
As part of routine inspections, food safety officers will check that the business has an appropriate HACCP-based food safety management system in place. This can affect the food hygiene rating of a business.
Sector specific food safety packs
Home bakers
Kebab businesses
- The Safer Food Better Business (SFBB) pack does not cover certain foods or processes such as kebabs. A specific kebab food safety pack has been developed to cover this activities. If fully completed, this can form part of your food safety management system. This should be completed in addition to the SFBB pack.
Useful links
Contact the Food Safety Team
Email: foodsafety-healthandsafety@conwy.gov.uk