FIFO stock rotation for UK food businesses

What you are trying to achieve

Stock rotation is a habit with a legal edge. It is against the law to serve food after its use-by date. Safer Food, Better Business says that plainly in the stock control safe method, because the date is about safety, not about how the packet looks. A tidy fridge with a packet of ham three days over date at the back is a worse visit than a shorter shelf that is all in date. Rotation is how you stop that packet being a surprise.

First in, first out is the phrase the pack uses. Older stock goes at the front. Newer stock goes behind it. Staff take from the front. When every delivery of the same product has a similar life, arrival order and date order are the same thing. They are not the same thing when a supplier sends a short-dated tray, or when you decant food and the label no longer matches the tub. Then the rule is the earliest date, not the box that feels newest. Some businesses call that first expired, first out. You do not need the second slogan if the safe method already says "use the shortest date first" and the team can see the date.

The aim is three checks that fit in a normal day. Food is in date when you accept it. Food is labelled so the next person knows what it is and when it must go. Food past its use-by date is thrown away when you find it, not saved for a staff meal, a soup, or "tomorrow if it smells all right". Waste reduction sits inside those checks. It does not replace them. The use-by and best-before guide is the difference between a safety date and a quality date. This page is how you move stock so those dates are visible and used in the right order.

What the stock control safe method expects

The management section of Safer Food, Better Business for caterers treats stock control as its own safe method. The checks are practical. Food you accept should be within its use-by date, cold enough if it is chilled or frozen, not spoiled, and in sound packaging. Throw away punctured vacuum packs, swollen packs and badly dented cans. Check that lids and seals are intact. Carry out regular stock checks and throw away anything that has passed its use-by date. Follow first in, first out so older stock is used first. Train staff in the order they should use foods. Record the stock checks in the diary. Review ordering, the rotation system and the supplier agreement when the same problem keeps appearing.

The pack also tells you what to do when you are overstocked. If you have more food than you will use before the use-by date, you may freeze some of it, if the food is suitable, before that date passes. Follow the manufacturer's instructions, label it, and use the freezing safe method. If you find food that has already passed the use-by date, throw it away immediately. If a delivery has not been handled safely, reject it if you can, do not use the food, and contact the supplier. Those are corrective actions, not optional extras. The corrective action guide is the shape of the diary note when a check fails.

Opening checks are where this meets the start of service. The usual list includes looking for food past its date and checking that chilled food is cold enough. A tick that says "dates checked" when nobody opened the back of the fridge is not a check. Close of play is the other natural moment: what is left, what is still in date tomorrow, and what must be labelled before it goes back. The SFBB guide explains how those daily lines and the 4-weekly review fit together. Scottish businesses should use the same habits inside CookSafe rather than ignoring dates because the pack has a different cover.

Dates you apply yourself

Food that arrives prepacked already has a date. Your job is to keep that date attached to the food and to use the earliest one first. The moment you open, decant, portion or cook, the printed date can vanish. A tub of ham with no label is not "the ham we opened recently". It is an unknown, and unknowns get thrown away or they get used too late. Label it.

A useful kitchen label has the name of the food and the date it must be used by. Add the date you opened or cooked it if that helps the next person see the life you applied. Day dots and coloured stickers are fine if everyone knows the key and the key is on the wall where the labels are, not in a drawer. A dot with no system is a coloured guess. Write dates as a day and a month the team can read. A code that only the head chef understands fails on their day off.

Do not restart the clock because the food has moved tub. The use-by date on the original pack still applies, and any "once opened, use within" instruction applies as well. The date you write is the earlier of those two. If the pack says use by the 20th and "use within two days of opening", and you open it on the 18th, the tub is done on the 20th, not on the 21st. If you open it on the 12th, the two-day instruction is the one that bites. Cooking on the use-by date can start a new life for the cooked dish under your safe method. Cooking after the use-by date does not. That distinction is in the use-by guide. Rotation cannot create a date the law will not allow.

High-risk ready-to-eat food you have cooked or opened on site has a short life unless you have evidence for longer. The chilled storage safe method in Safer Food, Better Business says to keep that food for a maximum of three days in total, the day you cook or open it plus two, unless you can show a longer life is safe. Follow the manufacturer's storage instructions where you have them. Label the dish when it goes into the fridge, not at the end of the week when somebody is trying to remember Tuesday's soup. The cooling guide is the step before that label. Food that cooled too slowly should not be given a neat three-day sticker to make the tray look managed.

Putting a delivery away

Rotation starts at the door, not when you notice a date during prep. Check the delivery before it joins the stock you already trust. Look at use-by and best-before dates, damaged packaging, and whether chilled and frozen food is still cold. The delivery temperature guide covers probes, rejection and the record. Dates are the other half of the same decision. A crate at the right temperature and a week past its use-by date is still a reject. A crate in date that is warm is still a reject. Do not "take it and see" because the driver is in a hurry.

Short-dated stock is a choice, not an accident you discover on Saturday. If you accept food that must be used tomorrow, put it at the front, tell the person who will prep tomorrow, and do not bury it under a fresher case of the same product. If you will not use it in time, refuse it. A discount is not a food safety control. Suppliers who regularly send you stock you cannot rotate are a review item, which is what the safe method means by looking again at the supplier agreement.

Then put it away in order. Take the old stock off the shelf, put the new stock at the back or underneath, and put the old stock at the front. Do this for the fridge, the freezer and the dry store. Do not slide a new case in front because the shelf is awkward. That single shortcut is why first in, first out fails in real kitchens. It takes a minute at delivery and it saves a bin bag later. If two products look alike, keep them in separate, labelled rows so a short-dated yoghurt is not stacked with a long-dated one because the pots match.

Frozen food needs the same discipline, and it is easier to get wrong because packs look identical once they are frosted. The stock control safe method warns that if labels on frozen food are not clear, new stock gets used before old stock. Wipe frost off the date when you put the pack away, or add your own label with the name and the date. Undated bags at the bottom of a drawer are how a year-old portion of chicken becomes "probably recent". Put frozen deliveries into the freezer as soon as they are checked, not after the lunch rush. A pallet in the yard is not a freezer.

Daily rotation, not a monthly clear-out

A monthly deep clean of the dry store is useful and it is not a rotation system. Dates move faster than that. Chilled high-risk food can go from acceptable to illegal over a weekend. Build a short look into opening, and a slightly slower look into the week.

• On delivery. Check dates, damage and temperature. Reject what you should not accept. Put older stock back to the front before the driver leaves, while the pile is still in your hand.
• At opening. Look for anything past its use-by date in the fridge you will use today. Check the dishes you labelled yourself. Throw away what has expired and note it if it should not have been there.
• Before prep. Read the label on the pack you are about to open. Use the one with the shortest date. If two packs have the same date, use the one already opened, if it is still inside its opened life and has been stored properly.
• When you close. Label anything you made or opened. Move anything that must be used first to where the next shift will see it. Do not leave a pan of soup unlabelled because you will "know it tomorrow".
• On a slower day. Walk the dry store and the freezer. Look behind and under. That is where out-of-date food lives. Record that you did it.

Train the order, not only the slogan. A new starter should be shown how you want a crate put away, with an old tray taken out and put back in front. Let them do one delivery while you watch. "Use the old stuff first" is forgotten the first time the shelf is full and a driver is waiting. The safe method can say who is allowed to accept a delivery. If that person is off, the deputy needs the same rules, including permission to refuse.

Supervision is the check that the habit is real. Once a week, or at the 4-weekly review if the business is small and quiet, look at one shelf as if you were the officer. Is the shortest date at the front? Is anything unlabelled? Is anything past its date still in the "we might use it" section rather than in the waste? Write what you found. A review that always says "stock control fine" and a bin that regularly contains food you could have used yesterday means the ordering or the labelling is wrong, not that the review sentence is finished.

Dry goods, cans and best-before dates

Use-by dates drive the safety decisions. Best-before dates still belong in the rotation. They tell you about quality: taste, texture, and whether the product is still worth serving. Safer Food, Better Business for retailers notes that food past a best-before date might not be as good to eat, and that the ideal is to remove it from sale by the end of that day. Caterers can make a similar judgement. A tin a few days past best-before, with no damage and no swelling, is a quality decision. A swollen can, a badly dented can, or a punctured pack is not. Those are thrown away whatever the date says. Do not rotate damaged stock to the front so that it is "used up". Using it up is how a dented can becomes a customer's meal.

Dry goods still need first in, first out. Flour, rice, oil, tinned tomatoes and spices are where money is lost and where pests are fed if bags stay open and old stock sits at the back for a year. Decant into lidded tubs if you need to, and label the tub with the product and the best-before from the bag. Do not top up a tub of flour with a new bag and leave the old flour at the bottom forever. Empty it, clean the tub, and refill. That is rotation and it is pest control at the same time. Open sacks on the floor fail both.

Eggs are usually marked with a best-before date. Rotate them. Use the oldest tray first. Do not treat a best-before as a reason to ignore a cracked or dirty shell, and do not use eggs past the date in foods that will not be thoroughly cooked. The use-by guide covers that distinction. For rotation, the practical point is the same as for yoghurt: the tray with the earlier date lives at the front, and a new delivery does not get stacked on top of it in the rush.

The freezer, and food you freeze yourself

Freezing pauses bacterial growth. It does not reset a use-by date that has already passed, and it does not label the food for you. Freeze before midnight on the use-by date, and only if the food is suitable for freezing. Follow the packet. If it says do not freeze, do not freeze it to avoid a waste figure. Note the date you froze it and what the food is. The Food Standards Agency's advice on chilling in businesses is to use that food within 24 hours of thawing. Defrost it in the fridge, not on the counter. The thawing guide is the method. A bag marked "chicken" with no date is the unidentified frozen food the Agency warns about, and it will be used in the wrong order because nobody can tell which bag is older.

Rotate the freezer the way you rotate the fridge. New portions at the back, older portions at the front, same product in the same basket. If you batch-cook and freeze, the label should say the dish and the date of freezing, and your safe method should say how long you keep it. "Until the drawer is full" is not a life. When you take a portion out, do not put a newer bag in front of three older ones you shoved aside. That is the frozen version of the delivery shortcut.

If you freeze food and then supply it to another business or sell it on, you take on extra labelling duties. The Agency's guidance on bulk freezing of ambient and chilled foods expects a date of freezing where the law requires one, a best-before date, your business details, and instructions for storage, defrosting and use. A kitchen freezer used only for your own service is a simpler label. Do not confuse the two and sell an unlabelled bag from the staff freezer because it is "only a wholesale tub".

Cutting waste without serving unsafe food

Waste is often an ordering problem wearing a labelling problem. The safe method already tells you to review ordering when stock control fails. Buy what you will use inside the date. A deal on three cases of salad is not a saving if two cases are binned on Monday. Match prep to the service you actually run. A full bain-marie of rice at 3pm, for a quiet evening, becomes a cooling and a dating problem as well as a waste problem. Smaller batches are easier to rotate and easier to cool. The cooling guide is the safety half of that choice.

Use food while it is still in date. That is the whole point of putting it at the front. Plan the menu around the short-dated items you accepted on purpose. Freeze suitable food before the use-by date, labelled, rather than hoping Saturday will be busy. Staff meals and a late "special" are reasonable uses of food that is still inside its date and has been stored safely. They are not a home for food that expired yesterday. Cooking expired food does not make it legal or safe. The bacteria you worry about are not always the ones that smell.

Separate waste from stock so a good pack is not grabbed from a "to throw" shelf. Once you have decided food is past its use-by date, it leaves the fridge. It does not sit in a corner "until the manager sees it" through the rest of service, where somebody will use it. Record the amount if you are trying to fix ordering. A line that says "two packs of ham binned, use-by was yesterday, found at the back" is more useful than a shrug. At review, those lines tell you whether to change the supplier, the shelf layout, or the person who puts deliveries away.

Quality dates are the flexible ones. A product past its best-before, still safe, still sound, can be used in a dish where a small change in texture does not matter, if your business is content to serve it and you are not misleading anyone about what it is. A product past its use-by cannot. Teach that difference explicitly. Teams that have been told "never waste food" will otherwise rescue the wrong packets. The sentence they need is "we do not waste food we can still use safely, and we always throw away food past its use-by date".

What to record

You do not need a stock book that takes longer than the delivery. You need a record that shows the system exists and that failures were dealt with.

• The safe method. First in, first out, shortest date first, who accepts deliveries, what is rejected, how you label food you open or cook, and the three-day rule for high-risk ready-to-eat food you prepare unless you have evidence for longer.
• Delivery notes. What you rejected and why, including dates and damage, not only temperatures. Link it to the delivery record you already keep.
• Opening checks. A real look for food past its use-by date. A comment when something was found and thrown away.
• Labels on the food. Name and use-by, on the container, at the time you open, cook or freeze it. The label is the record the next shift actually uses.
• Diary exceptions. Out-of-date food found, deliveries refused, freezing done because you were overstocked, and any time unlabelled food was discarded because nobody could date it.
• The 4-weekly review. Repeat waste, repeat finds at the back of the fridge, and whether ordering or supervision changed.

Keep labels legible. A sticker that falls off in the fridge is not a system. Write on tape that stays on, or use a label that survives condensation. If you use a digital diary, the same facts are required. A photo of a shelf is not a substitute for a date on the tub the cook is holding.

What environmental health officers check

Officers look in the fridge, the freezer and the dry store, including the back and the bottom. They compare dates with today. They pick up a decanted tub and see whether it has a name and a date. They ask who put the last delivery away and how that person decides what to use first. Then they look at the diary and the opening checks.

• Food past its use-by date still available for service, including staff food and "soup veg".
• New stock in front of older stock, or short-dated stock buried under a fresher delivery.
• Opened or cooked food with no label, or a label that gives a longer life than the original pack or your safe method.
• Frozen food with no name or date, so rotation is impossible.
• Damaged, swollen or blown packs kept because the date has not arrived yet.
• Delivery records that never show a rejection, next to food you should not have accepted.
• Whether staff can explain first in, first out without fetching the manager.

Finding one expired packet is a problem you can explain if the diary shows you are looking and acting. Finding several, in different fridges, with opening checks ticked all month, is a management problem. Officers score the pattern. Show them the label, the order on the shelf, and the last time you threw something away because the date said so. The inspection checklist is the rest of the visit. Stock rotation will not hide a warm fridge, and a cold fridge will not make an expired pack legal. Temperatures and dates are checked together. The fridge log guide sits beside this one for that reason.

Worked example

A neighbourhood restaurant keeps cooked ham and raw chicken in the same fridge, raw chicken in a lidded box on the bottom, ham on the shelf above. The safe method says deliveries are checked for date, damage and temperature, older stock is put back at the front, and anything opened is labelled with the name and the use-by. High-risk ready-to-eat food prepared on site is kept for the day of cooking plus two days unless the pack gives a shorter life. Stock checks are part of opening. Out-of-date food is thrown away the same day it is found.

On Monday two cases of cooked ham arrive. The case already in the fridge has a use-by of Thursday. One new case has a use-by of the following Wednesday. The other new case is short-dated, use-by Wednesday this week, and the driver mentions it. The temperature is fine and the packs are sealed. The manager accepts the short-dated case because Wednesday's sandwich service will use it, and accepts the longer-dated case. They refuse a third case the driver offers with a use-by of today. The delivery note says "one case refused, use-by is today".

Putting it away takes a minute. Thursday's ham comes off the shelf. Wednesday's short-dated ham goes at the front. Thursday's ham goes behind it. The following Wednesday's ham goes at the back. Nobody slides the new boxes in front of the old one. The opener on Tuesday is told the front case is Wednesday's date and should be used first. Tuesday's prep uses that case. The pack is labelled when it is opened, with a use-by that does not go past the printed date or the opened-life instruction, whichever is sooner.

On Friday a closer finds an unlabelled tub of sliced ham at the back, left by a shift that decanted without a sticker. Nobody can say whether it came from Thursday's pack or from an older one. It is thrown away. The diary says "unlabelled sliced ham binned at close, date unknown, back of fridge". They do not smell it and they do not turn it into a staff toastie. At the 4-weekly review the manager adds a line to closing checks: no decanted meat goes into the fridge without a label, and the person closing looks for tubs without one. The following month's waste note is about ordering too much lettuce, not about mystery ham. That is stock rotation working, including the food they refused and the food they discarded.

Common mistakes

• Putting new deliveries in front of older stock because the shelf is full.
• Accepting short-dated food you cannot use, because it was cheap.
• Decanting into a tub and leaving the use-by on the pack you threw away.
• Writing a new, longer date because the food looks fine.
• Using food past its use-by date for staff meals or soup.
• Freezing food the day after the use-by date to "save it".
• Identical frozen bags with no name and no date.
• Topping up a flour tub so the oldest flour never leaves the bottom.
• Ticking "dates checked" without looking at the back of the shelf.
• Keeping swollen cans or blown packs because the best-before has not arrived.

Where this comes from

This guide follows the stock control safe method in the Food Standards Agency's Safer Food, Better Business for caterers pack: first in, first out, regular stock checks, labels when you decant, and the rule that food past its use-by date is thrown away. It also follows the chilled storage safe method on shelf life for food you cook or open, and the Agency's business advice on chilling food correctly, including freezing before the use-by date and using food within 24 hours of thawing. Delivery checks sit alongside the date checks. Scottish businesses should follow Food Standards Scotland and CookSafe. Put your own suppliers, shelves and label rules into the safe method your team is trained on, and use the 4-weekly review to see whether food is still being found at the back.