Digital SFBB diary: can you replace the paper pack?

What the diary is there to prove

Food business operators must put in place procedures based on HACCP principles, follow them, and keep them up to date. That duty sits in assimilated Regulation (EC) No 852/2004. HACCP is the habit of naming the hazards that matter in this kitchen, controlling them, and checking the controls. It does not name a binder. The Food Standards Agency's Safer Food, Better Business packs are one practical way for small caterers to meet the duty. Our guide to what SFBB is separates the pack from the legal requirement.

The pack has two jobs that must not be collapsed into one. The safe methods say how this business handles cross-contamination, cleaning, chilling, cooking and management. The diary is the evidence that those methods were followed on the days you traded, including the days something failed. An officer who finds a beautiful safe-method section and a blank fortnight has found a policy, not a system.

In England, Wales and Northern Ireland the diary feeds confidence in management, one of the three areas scored in the Food Hygiene Rating Scheme. Gaps, identical handwriting for a whole month, and problems with no action all weaken that score. Scotland uses the Food Hygiene Information Scheme and many businesses there use CookSafe from Food Standards Scotland. The idea is the same: a record completed at the time, that a supervisor has actually looked at. The wider visit is in the EHO inspection checklist.

What you actually write down

The caterers pack asks for opening checks at the start of the day and closing checks at the end. The opening list in the Food Standards Agency safe method covers the things that make the kitchen safe to start: fridges, chilled display and freezers working; other equipment such as the oven working; staff fit for work and in clean work clothes; preparation areas clean and disinfected; no sign of pests; a probe that works, with probe wipes available; and allergen information that matches everything on sale. You can add checks that match your menu. You should not leave a line in for equipment you do not have.

Closing checks cover what you leave behind. Food that needs the fridge or freezer is covered, labelled and put away. The extra "prove it" checks you have promised are written down. The opening and closing lines also appear in the diary itself, so the day has a signature and a date, not only a tick on a wall chart nobody files.

• Trading days. An entry by a named person who was there. A closed Monday can be marked closed. A trading Monday with a blank line is a missed check.
• Extra checks. Deliveries, probe checks in melting ice and boiling water, and a look for pests are less often than opening, but the pack tells you to note them in the diary on the day you did them. See probe checks and fridge logs for the numbers those checks need.
• Problems. A warm fridge, a staff illness, a dropped pest sighting, a cooling that ran late. Write what happened and what you did, the same day. A diary with no problems for a year is hard to believe in a working kitchen.
• The 4-weekly review. A manager looks back, writes what repeated, and decides what changes. A signature on an empty review is a missed management check.

Temperatures can live on their own log if the diary says so and the log is the one staff complete. "Fridges on the temperature sheet" is honest when that sheet has today's readings. It is a hole when the sheet is blank and the diary tick is the only evidence. Use the same equipment names in both places. "The small one by the pass" and "Fridge B" will not reconcile while an officer is waiting.

Electronic diaries are already in the pack

The Food Standards Agency's instructions for the diary are plain. Keep completed pages safely until the next visit from a local authority food safety officer. That store can be electronic or printed. The pack describes two routes: download the diary pages, fill them in on a device and keep them electronically, or print the diary and fill it in. Refill pages exist so you are not reprinting the whole safe-method pack every month.

That is permission to leave the lever-arch file. It is not permission to stop the checks. A spreadsheet that only a director can open, a photo roll of blank forms, or a group chat called "temps" is not the diary the pack describes. The officer needs the same facts the paper page held: the day, the checks, the person, the failure, and the action. If your system is not the FSA PDF, it still has to cover the food operations you actually run, and someone on shift has to be able to show it without phoning head office.

There is no FSA list of approved diary apps. Officers assess whether your procedures are based on HACCP principles and whether you follow them. A digital record is acceptable when it is genuine, up to date, and available. A paper record is acceptable on the same terms. Choose the format the team will complete when the pass is busy, then make that the only master copy. The format comparison is in digital HACCP versus paper records.

What still has to be true on a screen

• Opening and closing checks for each trading day, completed by someone who was working, not reconstructed at the end of the week.
• The opening lines that protect customers that morning: cold equipment, fitness to work, clean surfaces, pests, the probe, and allergen information that matches today's menu, including specials.
• A place for the exception. If the only buttons are "yes", staff will press "yes" when the answer was "no".
• The 4-weekly review, with a sentence on what you found. Storing the daily rows does not do the review for you.
• History kept at least until the next inspection. The pack tells you to store completed pages until that visit. Do not auto-delete last month because the screen looks tidy.
• A fallback when the tablet is flat or the connection drops. A dated paper sheet for that day is fine if it captures the same facts and is filed without pretending the digital time was earlier.
• A login the people on shift can use. A record nobody in the building can open is a missing record for the length of the visit.

Shared logins named "kitchen" make it impossible to say who checked. Put a name on the entry. If two people open and one person closes, the diary should be able to say so. Backfilling a plausible "yes" over a missed Saturday is worse than a blank Saturday with a note that the check was missed and the food was looked at before service.

Why the paper folder fails quietly

Paper fails without a noise. A missed day looks the same as a busy day until someone sits down to prepare for an inspection. Folders go upstairs, into a car, or home with a manager who leaves. Pencil can be rewritten. The real story of a warm dessert fridge lives in a chat, while the official page stays spotless. Nobody at a second site can see that this site stopped three weeks ago.

The most common inspection problem in independent cafes and takeaways is not a dramatic handling failure on the day. It is evidence that stops. Officers are used to a diary that is immaculate until the week the usual supervisor went on holiday, then blank. They are also used to thirty days completed in the same pen on the morning they arrive. Both patterns damage confidence in management, even when the cooking they watch is competent.

Digital does not fix a team that ticks without looking. It fixes the failure modes that are about finding, dating and noticing gaps, if you set it up to mirror the real routine and you still supervise it. A screen that shows a missed Tuesday is useful only if someone acts on the Tuesday, not if it is opened the night before the officer is due.

Moving off paper without losing the history

Keep every completed paper diary. Those pages are still your evidence for the months before the change. Do not throw them out to look modern, and do not "complete" the blank weeks in them as part of the move. Start the digital diary on the next opening, using the same fridges, the same checks and the same sign-off points as the paper. If the paper opening list named the contact grill and the milk fridge, the screen should name them too.

1. Walk the safe methods first. Cross out controls you do not use. Add a short method for anything the template misses, such as rice cooling, a vacuum packer, or sandwiches you wrap before the customer chooses them.
2. Put the diary where the check happens. A tablet in the office recreates the folder upstairs. The pass, the prep bench, or the phone the opener already carries is more likely to be filled in at the time.
3. Run paper and digital together for a week or two if the team is nervous. Compare them. Then stop the paper. Two masters drift, and the officer will read the one that is worse.
4. Train the failure, not only the happy path. What do you tap when a fridge is at 9°C? Who do you tell? Where does the food go? What does the 4-weekly review have to mention afterwards?
5. Write the fallback for a dead battery or a lost login, and tell the closer where that paper sheet is filed.
6. Put the first 4-weekly review in the calendar before the first month has passed. The review is part of the move, not a reward for surviving it.

Do not start the new diary on the morning of a visit, and do not ask staff to retype six weeks of paper into a system so it looks continuous. Continuity is the paper folder in a box labelled with the dates, plus the digital record from the day you switched. Say that plainly if you are asked. Pretending the switch happened earlier is the sort of thing that unravels when the handwriting and the timestamps disagree.

The 4-weekly review still needs a person

SFBB builds the review into the diary every four weeks. That page does more for confidence in management than a stack of unread daily ticks, on paper or on a screen. A useful review names repeated warm readings, a check that stops when a particular person is off, training for a new starter, a new supplier, a new dish, and any safe method you changed. If nothing failed, write that you looked and what you sampled. A blank comment field with a digital signature is the same weakness as a blank paper line.

You do not need to re-read every satisfactory fridge figure aloud. You do need to notice that one unit is always the warm one, or that closing checks are missing on the chef's days off. Write the decision so the next four weeks have a starting point. How that habit feeds a hygiene rating is covered in moving a rating from 3 to 5.

What environmental health officers check

Authorised officers can enter at a reasonable time without an appointment. They are allowed to be unimpressed by a system that takes twenty minutes and a phone call to open. On a diary, paper or digital, they typically want:

• Today's opening check, done by someone who is on shift and can explain what they looked at.
• The same check for recent weeks, through to the last inspection if you have been asked to keep pages until the next visit.
• Safe methods that match the room. A digital diary that deleted hot holding, while a bain-marie of gravy sits on the pass, has become a gap.
• Real numbers where you have said you measure temperatures, and an action where a number was high.
• Allergen information that matches the menu the officer can see, including the specials board.
• A 4-weekly review signed by someone who supervises, with a decision in it.
• A worked failure. They will often pick a problem you recorded and ask what happened to the food.

They compare the record with the kitchen. If the screen says surfaces were clean and disinfected at opening, and the board they watch is encrusted, the diary has not helped you. If you can show six weeks in a minute, including one warm fridge with the food moved and the seal replaced, the format has done its job. Ask your local authority if you are unsure whether your sector pack is SFBB, CookSafe, or a Northern Ireland food safety management guide. The standard they will judge you against is the one you have trained the team to follow.

Worked example

A 28-cover cafe keeps the caterers diary in a folder in the upstairs office. Opening checks are ticked from memory at the end of service, often by whoever locks up. The milk fridge readings live in a group chat. Three weeks are blank from the period the supervisor was away. They decide to stop adding to the paper diary, and they leave the completed pages in a box marked with the dates. They do not fill the blanks.

The digital opening list uses the pack's lines and the equipment they have: contact grill, milk fridge, display fridge, wash-hand basin, cloths, pests, probe wipes, and the allergen card including the soup of the day. Fridge figures stay on the temperature log. The diary line says "fridges on the log" and the log uses the same names. For ten days they still initial the paper page, compare it with the screen, and then take the paper page off the clipboard so there is only one master. The closer is shown what to do when the tablet is flat: a dated sheet in the drawer, filed the next morning, not retyped as if it had been tapped at 10pm.

In week three the milk fridge is 9°C at opening. Milk is moved to the display fridge, the reading and the time are written, and the seal is booked. Thursday's recheck is 4°C. The 4-weekly review says "milk fridge seal; two missed Sunday openings now covered by the supervisor; soup allergen card reprinted when the recipe changed". When an officer visits in week eight, the cook opens today's checks and that review without fetching the owner. The old folder is produced when the officer asks about the month before the switch. There is one story, with a join in it, and the join is labelled.

Common mistakes

• Photographing the paper pack and calling the camera roll a diary.
• Running paper and digital forever, so they disagree.
• A shared login, so the record cannot name the person who checked.
• Deleting or editing a failed reading so the month looks clean.
• Dropping fitness to work, pests, or allergen accuracy because they were "just" lines on the paper opening list.
• Keeping temperatures in the diary and again on a clipboard and again in a Sunday spreadsheet.
• A 4-weekly review that is signed and empty, or never opened because "the system stores it".
• No one on shift who knows how to show last month when the officer asks.
• Backfilling the weeks before go-live so the history looks continuous.

Where this comes from

This guide follows the Food Standards Agency pages on Safer Food, Better Business and managing food safety, including the instruction to keep completed diary pages until the next local authority visit, electronically or on paper. The legal backdrop is the HACCP-based procedure duty in assimilated Regulation (EC) No 852/2004. Opening and closing content follows the caterers safe method: cold equipment, fitness to work, cleaning, pests, the probe, and accurate allergen information. Scottish businesses should use Food Standards Scotland guidance and CookSafe where that is their pack. Northern Ireland businesses should use the food safety management guides their local authority expects, which may not be the England and Wales diary refill. Nothing here replaces your own safe methods. The diary is only as good as the checks it records and the person who reviews them.

Related pages

What is SFBB?Food safety documentsOpening and closing checklistEHO readiness quizRestaurantsPaper SFBB pack comparison

Sources

Last reviewed 22 October 2026. These links are the pages this guide was checked against. They are not an endorsement of Localyn, and they do not make a kitchen compliant.

• Safer food, better business (Food Standards Agency)
• Safer Food, Better Business for caterers (Food Standards Agency pack)
• Assimilated Regulation (EC) No 852/2004 on the hygiene of foodstuffs
• Managing food safety

Template, tool and hub

• Opening and closing checklist
• EHO readiness quiz
• Restaurants