Digital SFBB diary: can you replace the paper pack?
Safer Food, Better Business (SFBB) is the Food Standards Agency's food safety management pack for small catering businesses. Thousands of cafes and takeaways still run it as a paper folder — but nothing in the guidance requires paper. Here is what inspectors actually expect, and how to move to a digital diary without losing your evidence.
What SFBB records are for
SFBB is a practical way of meeting the legal requirement to have a food safety management system based on HACCP principles. The pack has two halves: the safe methods (how you handle cross-contamination, cleaning, chilling and cooking) and the diary (daily proof that you opened and closed safely, plus a record of anything that went wrong and what you did about it).
When an environmental health officer visits, the diary is one of the main things they use to judge confidence in management — one of the three areas that decide your food hygiene rating. Gaps, backfilled weeks and missing corrective actions all undermine it. See our guide on preparing for an EHO inspection for how that scoring works.
Are digital records accepted?
Yes. The requirement is that your records are genuine, up to date and available when an officer asks for them. The FSA does not mandate a format, and officers routinely review records on a tablet or printed from a system during inspections. What matters is that a digital diary shows the same things the paper one would:
- Daily opening and closing checks, signed off by a named person
- Temperature records for fridges, freezers and hot holding — see our fridge temperature log guide
- Problems recorded honestly, each with a corrective action and a close-out
- The periodic review (the "4-weekly check" in the paper pack) actually happening
Why paper packs fail in practice
Paper fails quietly. A missed day looks the same as a busy day until inspection prep, folders go missing when a manager leaves, and nobody can see across sites which records are slipping. The most common inspection problem is not bad food handling — it is evidence that stops three weeks before the visit.
Moving off paper without losing history
- Keep your completed paper folders — they are still your evidence for past months.
- Set up your digital diary to mirror your actual routine: the same fridges, the same checks, the same sign-off points.
- Run both for a week or two so staff build the habit before the paper folder goes in the drawer.
- Make sure whatever you use can produce an inspection-ready report on demand.
Put this into practice with Localyn
Localyn gives cafes, restaurants and takeaways a digital SFBB diary, temperature and cleaning records, allergen management and inspection-ready reports — all in one place.