Accepting food deliveries safely in a UK food business

Why acceptance is a control, not a courtesy

Assimilated Regulation (EC) No 852/2004 says a food business must not accept raw materials or ingredients if they are known to be, or might reasonably be expected to be, so contaminated that normal preparation would still leave the food unfit. That duty sits at your door, not at the supplier's depot. You are not expected to laboratory-test every case. You are expected to refuse food that is obviously damaged, spoiled, out of date, pest-marked, chemically tainted, or warm when it should be cold. Once it is on your shelf, an environmental health officer will treat it as food you chose to keep.

Safer Food, Better Business for caterers puts the same idea in the suppliers and chilling safe methods: use suppliers you can trust, check food as it arrives, and put chilled and frozen food away at once. A delivery note signed "received in good condition" while the crates are still on the step is not that method. The note is the haulier's paperwork. Your record is the decision your own staff make, with a temperature where temperature matters, and a reason when they say no.

Temperature is one part of the decision, and it already has its own page. The delivery temperature guide covers the probe, the 8°C legal maximum for cold food in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, the practical colder margin, and what −18°C means for frozen food. This page is the rest of the doorstep: the person who is allowed to accept, the vehicle, the packaging, the dates, the allergens, the driver's route through your building, and the rejection you can still explain next month. If you only copy the temperature numbers and ignore the rest, you will still accept food you should have sent back.

Scottish businesses should follow Food Standards Scotland and CookSafe. The doorstep habit is the same. Name the limits in your own safe method, train the person who meets the van, and keep the note where receiving actually happens.

Who is allowed to accept

Acceptance is a decision with consequences, so it belongs to a named role, not to whoever is nearest the buzzer. In a small cafe that is often the opener or the supervisor on shift. In a larger kitchen it may be a goods-in person. Write the name of the role in the safe method. "Any chef" becomes "nobody", because each person assumes the other one looked. Agency staff and new starters do not accept high-risk food on their first morning unless you have shown them the sheet and watched them do it.

The person who accepts needs five things within reach: a probe that has passed its check, the accept limits for chilled and frozen food, a pen or a tablet that works at the door, authority to say no to a driver who is in a hurry, and a way to tell the kitchen that a line is not coming in. Authority matters. If the only person who may reject is an owner who is not on site, staff will accept warm ham rather than argue. Give the shift lead the right to refuse, and back them when a supplier complains.

They also need to know what they are not deciding. They are not renegotiating the price. They are not "using it up" because the special is already on the board. They are not washing a contaminated salad and calling it checked. If they are unsure, the default in a decent method is to hold the food apart, labelled, and get a competent person before it enters the fridge you serve from. Holding is not the same as accepting. Accepted food is food you are prepared to cook or serve. Held food is still in quarantine.

Two people can split the job if you write it down. One meets the driver and checks the load. Another puts accepted food away. What you cannot split is responsibility for the yes or no. One name goes on the line. If the put-away is delayed, that delay is part of the record, because food accepted at 7:40 and still on the pass at 9:00 has spent that time out of the cold chain you just measured.

Before the van arrives

A good acceptance starts with the order. Know what is due, which lines are high-risk, and whether a substitution would change an allergen. Milk, gluten-free flour, a different brand of mayonnaise, and a "similar" cooking oil are not casual swaps. If the invoice species or the brand changes, the allergen guide is the reason you stop and update the matrix before the ingredient reaches a labelled sandwich or a spoken menu answer. Tell the receiver which lines are allergens you have promised customers you control.

Make space before the drop, not during it. A chilled delivery that cannot fit in a cold fridge will sit out while someone "has a sort out". That is how an acceptable delivery becomes a warm one. The same is true of the freezer. If the walk-in is packed to the door, the chips will wait in the yard. Move short-dated stock forward, using the stock rotation guide, and clear a shelf before the buzzer goes. If you genuinely have no safe space, refuse the extra cases or delay the drop. Do not accept food you cannot store.

Plan the route. Food comes in through one door. Waste does not leave through the same doorway at the same moment if you can avoid it. Chemicals do not ride on the food trolley. Raw meat does not cross the ready-to-eat bench. The visitor and contractor guide is the wider rule for people in the building. Deliveries are the version you face most mornings: a stranger, a hurry, and a door that wants to stay open.

Have the rejection tools ready as well. A roll of "rejected" tape or a printed label, a spare crate that is not used for service food, and the supplier's phone number. Hunting for a pen while the driver revs the van is how checks get skipped. If the tablet lives in the office and the office is locked until ten, you do not have a delivery record. A dated paper line at the door is a valid record. A reconstructed line at the end of the week is not.

Delivery staff, and the contamination they bring

The driver is not your enemy, and they are not your food handler. They have been in other yards, other bins, and other cold stores. Their hands, their boots, their crates and their coat are outside dirt until you have a reason to think otherwise. The safest default in a small kitchen is that they stop at the threshold. Your team unloads. The driver does not carry raw meat through the sandwich section because it is quicker, and they do not "help" by sliding trays into the fridge.

If a driver must enter a room where open food is handled, they follow the same illness rule as any other visitor. The Food Standards Agency's fitness to work guidance includes visitors, not only people on the payroll. Ask whether they have had diarrhoea or vomiting in the last 48 hours, and whether they have infected skin they cannot cover. A yes means they do not come in. They can leave the delivery at the door for your staff, or you can refuse the drop until another driver comes. You do not need a long form for a person who never crosses the threshold. You do need the question when they will stand next to open food. Do not shorten the 48 hours because the drop is late.

Watch what they touch. Crates go on a designated trolley or a low shelf in the goods-in area, not on a chopping board, not on clean plates, and not on the pass. Outer cardboard is often dirty and is a pest risk. Break it down at the door and take it out. Do not let the driver stack empty plastic returns on the bench you have just sanitised. A returns crate that held raw chicken this morning is not a clean surface because it looks dry.

The door itself is a control. A door propped for the whole drop lets pests in, lets heat in, and lets anyone wander through. Open it for the cases you are moving, then shut it. If the driver wants it wedged "for the second trip", your staff do the second trip and the wedge comes out. Smoking, vaping and eating happen off the step, not over the crates. A driver who handles cash, a phone, and then the film lid of a ready-to-eat tray has just used the packaging as a hand-contact surface. Your team should assume outer packs are dirty and wash their hands before they touch food or a food-contact surface. Gloves worn to unload and then to garnish are dirty gloves. The handwashing guide is the standard you are applying at goods-in, in a shorter form.

Personal visitors are a separate problem that often arrives with the van. A friend in the cab does not come in to use the staff toilet through the kitchen, and a child does not wait by the fryer. Point them to the customer entrance. If that feels awkward, it is still the rule. The kitchen is not a corridor.

Engineers and sales reps sometimes ride in on a delivery. They are visitors, with the sign-in and the clean-down in the visitor guide. Do not let "I just need a quick look at the fridge" become an unrecorded repair in the middle of unloading. Finish the delivery decision first. Food that is still unchecked does not get pushed aside onto the raw-meat table so someone can open a panel.

The vehicle and the way the load is stacked

You will not audit the supplier's whole cold chain. You will look at the compartment you can see when the door is open. A chilled and frozen load should arrive in a vehicle that is clean enough, cold enough, and stacked so that raw food cannot drip onto ready-to-eat food. Filthy floors, standing water, a strong smell of spoilage, insects, droppings, or gnawed packaging are reasons to refuse the affected food, and often the whole drop from that compartment. Write what you saw. "Van dirty" is weaker than "blood and loose raw trim on the floor under the salad crates, drop refused, driver asked to leave".

Mixed loads need a harder look. Raw poultry above an uncovered cheesecake is a reject of the ready-to-eat food even if both temperatures are perfect. Chemicals, fuel cans, and open containers of detergent do not travel in the same stack as open or poorly wrapped food. A sealed sanitiser drum can come on the same van if it is upright, not leaking, and taken to the chemical store before any food crate is carried in. If it has leaked onto packaging, that packaging is contaminated. Do not wipe it and hope. Reject the food it touched. The cleaning schedule guide is where those chemicals belong once they are accepted as chemicals, not as ingredients.

Frozen and chilled food should not be stacked in the ambient section of a van "because there was no room". If you can see that the frozen cases were by the bulkhead door with the bread, treat them as a temperature risk and check them first. Ambient goods still get a look: tins that are badly dented on the seam, blown packs, wet sacks, and bags with holes. You do not probe every tin. You do refuse food that is not what you would store.

Pest evidence on a delivery is a food incident, not a paperwork quibble. Gnaw marks, droppings in a sack of rice, insects in a flour bag, or a trail of grease that looks like rodent smears mean that pack is rejected. Tell the supplier the same day. Look at your own door and bin store that afternoon, because a contaminated delivery is also how pests are invited in. The pest-control guide covers what you do inside the building. The delivery record is what shows the problem arrived with the van rather than living behind your freezer.

Packaging, dates and identity

Check that the product is the product you ordered. Species, cut, brand and quantity matter. A substitution of turkey for chicken, or of a nut-containing pesto for a plain one, is an allergen and a menu problem before it is a cost problem. If the label does not match, do not accept it into anonymous tubs. Either refuse it or accept it only after a named person has updated the allergen information and the team have been told. Silent acceptance is how a customer is misled.

Use-by dates are a safety line. Do not accept food to "use today" if the use-by was yesterday, and do not accept food that will expire before you can use it unless you have a genuine plan to use or freeze it legally before the date. Freezing does not reset a use-by that has already passed. The use-by and best-before guide is the rule for staff once food is in the building. At the door, the rule is simpler: out of date means it does not come in. Best-before is about quality. You may accept short-dated best-before food if it is sound and you will use it while it is still good, and you should say so on the line so nobody treats it as a safety failure later.

Packaging has to protect the food. Refuse blown packs, punctures, leaking vacuum packs, badly dented cans on the seam, broken glass, and bags that are wet from someone else's thaw. A split outer carton can be acceptable if the inner pack is intact, clean, and in date, and you decant or re-box without bringing filthy cardboard into the kitchen. A split inner pack of raw meat is a reject, or at least a decision to cook it immediately only if your method allows damaged raw packs and the food is still cold and unspoiled. Most small kitchens should refuse it. Ready-to-eat food with a broken seal is a reject. You cannot see whether it was coughed on, dripped on, or left open in the van.

Foreign bodies are a reject too. Glass in a crate, a screw in a salad bag, a plaster, or a piece of packaging inside the food means that pack does not enter production. Isolate it for the supplier if they want it back as evidence, labelled so a cook cannot use it. Do not "pick it out" of a ready-to-eat product and serve the rest. If the foreign body might be in other packs from the same batch, hold the batch and phone the supplier before you decide. Traceability is why you write the batch or lot code on high-risk lines when it is printed. Article 18 of Regulation (EC) No 178/2002 expects you to know who supplied you. A batch code makes a withdrawal possible without throwing away every delivery from that company.

Labels in a language you cannot read are a practical problem. Allergen information has to be available in a form your staff can use. If the only ingredient list is a code you cannot decode, do not put that product into a prepacked sandwich until someone has a proper specification. Imported goods and cash-and-carry bargains are where this fails. A cheap case with no English allergen statement is not a saving if you cannot answer a customer or an officer.

Temperature without repeating the whole method

Take the temperature before you accept, not after the food has sat on the pass. Chilled high-risk food in England, Wales and Northern Ireland is legally required to be kept at 8°C or below. That is a maximum, not a target. Frozen food should arrive frozen hard, at about −18°C or colder. The probe technique, the sample you take, the reason an infrared gun is only a screen, and the products that are colder than 8°C by specification are all in the delivery temperature guide. Use that method. Do not invent a warmer limit because the driver is late.

What this page adds is the order of the decision. Look, then probe, then decide, then sign. Do not sign the driver's sheet first. Do not probe after you have already put the food in the fridge and "let it settle". A reading taken twenty minutes later in your own fridge is a storage reading, not a delivery reading. If the driver will not wait for the check, they can leave without a signature. A business that cannot spare two minutes at the door does not have a delivery control.

Hot food from a central kitchen, if you receive it, is its own line. It should arrive hot enough to go straight into hot holding, usually 63°C or above, or it should be on a planned cool-down that you can finish in time. A sealed tray at 50°C is not accepted because it is "still warm". Write the number and the decision. The hot holding guide and the cooling guide take over once you have accepted it. If you cannot hot-hold or cool it properly, do not accept it.

Partial loads, and food you are tempted to keep

You can accept part of a drop and reject the rest. Mark the delivery note so the rejected lines are obvious, and write your own line for each decision that matters. Do not let a single signature cover both the good milk and the warm ham. The driver may want one answer. You are allowed to give two.

The temptations are predictable. Cooking does not repair a use-by date that has passed. Cooking does not remove chemical contamination, glass, or pest filth. Cooking may kill some bacteria in raw meat, but it does not make a spoiled, warm, or dripped-on delivery a good delivery, and it does nothing for ready-to-eat food you will not cook again. Some toxins and the histamine in abused fish are not solved by a hot pan. If the food smells wrong, looks wrong, or has been out of temperature control for a time you cannot account for, reject it. "We'll cook it hard" is not a safe method.

Rinsing is the other temptation. A lettuce with raw-meat blood on the leaves is waste. A rinse does not turn it back into a checked salad. Raw meat in a sound, cold, in-date pack can still be accepted on its own merits even when a neighbouring ready-to-eat pack is rejected because of drip. Decide pack by pack. Do not punish the whole drop out of irritation, and do not save the whole drop out of kindness.

Short-dated food you accept must be labelled and put where the team will use it first. If you already know you will throw it away on Thursday, do not accept it on Monday to be polite. Suppliers learn from what you refuse. They do not learn from food you quietly bin after they have gone.

How to reject, and where the food waits

Say no at the door, to the driver, and then to the supplier if the driver is only the haulier. Tell them what failed: temperature, date, packaging, contamination, pests, or the wrong product. Keep it factual. Ask them to take the food back on the van if they will. Food that leaves with the driver cannot be used by mistake.

If they will not take it, quarantine it. Label it "rejected — do not use", with the date and the reason. Keep it out of the service fridge if you possibly can. A separate sealed box in a back fridge, or a collection by the supplier the same day from a marked crate in the goods-in area, can work. What cannot happen is an unmarked tray of rejected ham on the shelf above tonight's salad. A cook in a hurry will use the food that is in the fridge. The label has to be obvious, and the place has to be a place cooks do not grab from.

Do not cool rejected food "until they collect it" in among food you will serve. Cooling it hides the failure and warms the fridge. If a collection will take days and you have no safe quarantine, it is often cleaner to throw the food away, record that you threw it away, and claim the credit from the note. Waste with a record is better than a hazard you stored. Do not put rejected food in the freezer to "stop it getting worse" and then forget it. That is how a bad delivery becomes a mystery bag in March.

A rejection is a corrective action. Write what was wrong, what you did immediately, and what you will do next. Next might be a credit, a cash-and-carry replacement, a dish taken off the board, or a conversation with the supplier about the van. The shape of that note is in the corrective action guide. A blank log and a verbal complaint will not help you when the same van is warm again in a fortnight.

What to write down

For a routine accept of high-risk chilled or frozen food, a short line is enough: date and time, supplier, product, temperature, accept, and the name of the person who checked. For a reject, add the reason and what happened to the food. Ambient goods can be a lighter note unless something was wrong. You do not need a paragraph for every bottle of vinegar. You do need a line for the ham, the milk, the raw chicken, the frozen prawns, and anything else your method names.

Invoices and delivery notes support traceability if they match what arrived. They show who you bought from, what, and when. They do not replace the temperature or the condition check. Keep them where you can find them for a recall: with the diary, or in a folder the supervisor can open without phoning the bookkeeper. A practical house rule is to keep them at least as long as you keep the daily diary, and longer if a product has a long shelf life still in the building. Officers and recall messages do not wait while you search a van.

Write batch or lot codes for the high-risk foods that carry them, especially if you bought a large case you will use over several days. If a supplier later withdraws a lot, you want to know whether it is on your shelf. If you decant into your own tubs, the tub label must carry the name and the date. The original code can live on the delivery line. Do not rely on a sleeve you threw into the cardboard skip.

The driver's proof-of-delivery signature is their document. Sign it only after the check, and if you are rejecting lines, mark them before you sign. If their form has no space, your own sheet still records the truth. Never backdate a check, and never type a temperature you did not take because the column looks untidy. The delivery temperature log is a printable set of columns for the temperature half. Add a condition note beside it when packaging, pests, or the driver's route was the reason you said no. The corrective action record is there when the line needs more than a tick in a reject column.

If the power is out on the tablet, use paper the same day. Transfer later if you wish, but leave the original time visible. A digital timestamp that pretends the check happened earlier than it did is the sort of record that collapses when an officer compares it with the delivery note.

Putting accepted food away

Accepted chilled food goes into the fridge immediately. Accepted frozen food goes into the freezer while it is still hard. The route is the one you planned: not across open ready-to-eat food, not past the waste bins if you can help it, and not via a bench that has just been used for raw prep unless that bench has been cleaned and disinfected. Wash hands between raw crates and ready-to-eat storage.

Outer cardboard stays out of the fridge. Decant dirty outers into clean lidded containers at goods-in, and copy the name and the date onto the new label. Raw food goes below ready-to-eat food, covered. The fridge layout guide is the shelf plan. The freezer log guide is what happens after frozen food is in the cabinet. A delivery check does not excuse a fridge that is already at 10°C. If the only fridge is warm, you do not have a safe place to accept chilled food. Fix the fridge or refuse the drop.

New stock goes behind older stock. That is rotation, and it fails at the moment of put-away more often than it fails on a quiet Tuesday audit. The person who unloads is the person who rotates. Do not leave "I'll rotate it later" as a habit. Later is when the short-dated ham is buried.

After a bad delivery

Phone or email the supplier the same day with the facts: product, time, what you measured or saw, and whether you need a credit or a replacement. Keep a copy. If the same failure repeats, the corrective action is not another angry call. It is a decision about the supplier. Safer Food, Better Business expects you to use reputable suppliers. A supplier who regularly delivers warm high-risk food, or who will not take rejects back, is a supplier your 4-weekly review should name. You can change the drop time, the product, or the company. You cannot keep accepting the failure.

Look at your own side as well. If every reject is "we were too busy to check until lunch", the fix is the rota, not the van. If drivers always walk through because the goods-in door is blocked by the bin, move the bin. If the probe was missing, the probe lives at the door from tomorrow. Write the change in the review so it is not a speech that nobody heard.

A withdrawal or a recall is the same record used in anger. If a supplier tells you a lot is unsafe, you need to find it, stop using it, and know whether you have already served it. That is why the delivery line exists. Follow the supplier's instruction and the Food Standards Agency's advice if a recall reaches you through them. Do not serve the food while you decide whether the email is genuine. Hold it, label it, and check.

What environmental health officers check

Officers rarely arrive while the van is on the step. They ask what you do when it comes, then they look for evidence that the answer is true. They are scoring whether the business is run so that unsafe food is refused, not whether your handwriting is tidy.

• The person who receives food can describe the accept and reject rules without reading them for the first time, including dates, packaging, and what they do about the driver.
• Recent high-risk deliveries have a product, a temperature where one was required, a decision, and a name. A column of ticks is not a decision.
• A rejection exists in the last few months, or you can explain a quiet period honestly. A year of perfect accepts beside a casual "we sometimes send stuff back" is hard to believe.
• Rejected food is not unmarked in the service fridge. Accepted food is not still on the floor or the pass.
• Raw and ready-to-eat foods are not unloaded into the same wet tray, and chemicals are not stored on food crates.
• You can name the supplier of the ham, the milk, or the rice you are using today, and find the delivery note.
• Staff can say whether drivers enter the kitchen, and what happens if a driver has been ill. A propped door and a crate on the sandwich board contradict a careful policy.
• Allergen substitutions are not a surprise. The matrix matches the brands on the shelf.

They may look at food that "just arrived". If it is warm, damaged, or out of date, the acceptance step failed, whatever the sheet says. How that sits inside a full visit is in the inspection checklist. Confidence in management is the part that asks whether you will still refuse the van on a busy Saturday when nobody is watching.

Worked example

A cafe takes a mixed wholesaler drop at 7:30, before sandwich prep. The safe method says the supervisor accepts high-risk food, drivers stay at the yard door, chemicals never sit on food crates, and chilled high-risk food above 8°C is rejected. The diary and a paper delivery sheet live on a clipboard at that door, not in the office.

The driver says they were ill with diarrhoea yesterday and wants to wheel the stack through the kitchen to save time. They do not come in. Staff unload at the threshold. The door is shut between trips. A sealed drum of sanitiser is on top of a case of cooked ham. The drum is taken to the chemical store first. It has not leaked. The ham is 5°C between packs, the seal is intact, and the use-by is six days away. Accepted. It is labelled and put on the ready-to-eat shelf within ten minutes.

A case of raw chicken underneath has a torn inner bag. Blood is on the outside of a box of bagged salad that was standing in the same crate. The chicken is rejected because the pack is open and leaking. The salad is rejected because raw meat juices are on the ready-to-eat packaging and the leaves cannot be shown to be protected. Neither goes into a fridge "to sort later". The driver takes both back. The sheet says: "07:42 chicken rejected, torn pack, leaking. Salad rejected, raw blood on outer box. Returned on van. Supplier phoned. Sam." The milk in the same drop is 4°C and in date. Accepted. The rice is dry, the sack is intact, there are no pests, and the best-before is comfortable. Accepted. Cardboard stays in the yard bin. Hands are washed before anyone touches the ham containers again.

Lunch sandwiches use the accepted ham. The salad garnish comes off the board until a cash-and-carry replacement is checked and accepted on a new line. At the 4-weekly review the owner writes two changes: sanitiser is never stacked on food, and the driver company is told again that ill drivers do not enter. The chicken credit appears on the next invoice and is stapled to the diary line. That is acceptance working, including the food they did not serve.

Common mistakes

• Signing the driver's sheet before anyone has looked at the food.
• Letting drivers carry raw crates across ready-to-eat benches, or prop the door for the whole drop.
• Skipping the illness question when a driver will stand next to open food.
• Accepting food past its use-by because it "looks fine" or because you plan to cook it.
• Wiping raw juices off a ready-to-eat pack and serving it.
• Putting rejected food, unmarked, into the service fridge until the supplier collects it.
• Checking temperature after the food has already warmed up on the pass, and writing that number as the delivery temperature.
• Accepting an allergen substitution without updating the matrix or telling the team.
• Bringing filthy outer cardboard, and the pests that come with it, into the fridge.
• Having no named person who is allowed to say no.
• Keeping a year of perfect ticks and no note of the rejects everyone remembers making.
• Storing chemicals on the same trolley as open food.

Where this comes from

The duty not to accept contaminated raw materials is in assimilated Regulation (EC) No 852/2004, Annex II, Chapter IX. Traceability, including knowing who supplied you, is Article 18 of Regulation (EC) No 178/2002. Cold-holding temperatures and the practical fridge target are explained in the Food Standards Agency's chilling guidance, and supplier checks sit in its managing food safety guidance and in Safer Food, Better Business for caterers. Fitness to work for people who enter food rooms, including visitors, is on the Agency's fitness to work page. What officers look at more widely is covered in food safety inspections and enforcement. Scottish businesses should follow Food Standards Scotland and CookSafe. Write the doorstep rules for your own building, train the person who meets the van, and check at the 4-weekly review that the last bad delivery was refused and recorded.