Chilling and cold storage

What you are being asked to do

Safer Food, Better Business puts chilling next to cooking, cleaning and cross-contamination as one of the safe methods a catering kitchen has to make specific. The Food Standards Agency expects food that needs to be cold to be put away promptly, cooled quickly if it has just been cooked, and kept out of the fridge for the shortest time while you work. Your job on shift is the handling: where the box goes, how the fridge is loaded, what the date on the tub means, and what you do when a unit is warm.

Follow your own safe method if it is stricter than the general figures below. A blank pack does not outrank a temperature your manager has set for a particular fridge. Businesses in Scotland should follow Food Standards Scotland as well as the working temperatures in their own pack. Where the law states 8°C, that number is a ceiling for England, Wales and Northern Ireland. It is a poor setting to aim at.

The temperatures you work to

• 8°C or below. England, Wales and Northern Ireland require most food that must stay chilled to be kept no warmer than 8°C. Treat that as the point where you have already run out of margin, not as the number you want to see on the display.
• 5°C or below. The Food Standards Agency recommends you set fridges at 5°C or colder so ordinary door openings, a warm delivery, and a packed service still leave the food at a safe temperature. Write the setting your kitchen actually uses, and check against that.
• −18°C or colder. Commercial freezers are run around −18°C to −21°C. Frozen food should be frozen hard. Cold temperatures delay spoilage. They do not kill the bacteria already in the food, which is why thawing has to be controlled.
• 8°C to 63°C. This is the danger zone, where bacteria multiply fastest. Every minute a high-risk food spends there without a reason is time you did not need to give them. Chilling, cooking and hot holding are the three ways you move food out of that band. Cooking temperatures are in the cooking module. This module is the cold side.

Some bacteria still grow slowly in a correct fridge. Listeria is the one staff need to remember by name, because it can multiply in chilled ready-to-eat food and you cannot smell it. That is why a use-by date is a safety limit even when the ham looks and smells normal, and why ready-to-eat food is not left in the fridge "until it goes".

What has to be kept cold

If the label says keep refrigerated, it goes in the fridge. So does food with a use-by date, food you have cooked and plan to serve cold or reheat later, opened cans and jars you have transferred to a tub, cream, custard, cooked rice, pasta, meat, fish, and most sandwiches and salads. When a packet is silent and you are unsure, ask. Do not leave it on a shelf because nobody circled it on the delivery note.

Whole fresh fruit and vegetables, bread, and unopened tins and dry goods do not live in the fridge unless the label tells you otherwise. Filling the salad fridge with unopened canned tomatoes wastes space and blocks the air the ham needs. Raw meat has a place, and it is not above the cake. Where raw food sits is part of stopping meat juices falling onto cake, salad, or anything else you will serve without a further cook step. The detail of that separation is the cross-contamination module. In this module the rule you apply while loading is simple: raw meat, poultry and fish on the bottom, ready-to-eat food above, everything covered.

Putting a delivery away

Chilled food starts warming up the moment it leaves the van. Walking it to the dry store "to check it later", or parking it on the pass while you finish a prep list, is how a legal delivery becomes an unsafe one. High-risk chilled food goes into a working fridge before you do the next job. Frozen food goes into the freezer while it is still hard, not after it has sweated on the side.

Look at the food as you put it away. A chilled pack that is warm to the touch, a frozen pack that is soft or sitting in liquid, a blown pack, a broken seal, or a use-by date that has already passed does not go into stock to "see if it cools down". Tell the person who receives deliveries. The fridge is not a rescue device. Food that has been too warm does not become safe because it is cold again.

Loading a fridge so it can do its job

• Cover and label. Every tub gets a name and a date your kitchen understands. An unlabelled white sauce is a guess for the next person, and guesses are how allergens and old food both get served.
• Leave the air a path. Do not block the fan or pack the shelves until the door will barely shut. Cold air has to move. A fridge that is jammed with trays will show a poor temperature even when the motor is running.
• Keep the door shut. Propping it open while you "do all the labels at once" warms every shelf. Take out the tub you need, shut the door, work, put it back.
• Never put steaming food in. Hot food warms the fridge and the food already in it. Cool it first, the way the next section describes.
• Do not mix today's delivery with last week's tubs at the front. Older food comes forward. Newer food goes behind. That is rotation, and it only works if the dates are visible without unpacking the shelf.

Cooling hot food before it is chilled

Cooked food that you are keeping has to come back through the danger zone. Get the heat out of it before it goes into a fridge: the Food Standards Agency wants that cooling to be quick, and Safer Food, Better Business expects the method to be fast enough to work in your kitchen, not only on a poster. Plenty of packs set their own limit at about 90 minutes from the end of cooking until the food is in the fridge. If your safe method states a time, that is the time you work to. "Leave it until it stops steaming" is not a method if the pan is deep.

Split the batch. A hotel pan two centimetres deep loses heat. A deep pot of gravy can still be cooking-hot in the centre long after the top seems tepid to a fingertip. Metal moves heat out faster than a thick plastic bucket. Stir liquids so the centre moves. An ice bath under the container helps when the recipe allows it. If you have a blast chiller, use it as the pack says. If you do not, the portioning is what makes the target possible. Cover the food once it is cold, then label it. While it is still hot and uncovered, keep it away from raw food, dirty cloths and the open back door.

Rice, stews, gravies, cooked pulses, pasta and dairy sauces punish slow cooling. Cooked rice is a particular risk because Bacillus cereus spores can survive cooking, grow if the rice sits warm, and produce a toxin that later reheating may not destroy. Spreading rice in a thin layer and getting it cold is a safety step, not a nicety before it goes into fried rice tomorrow.

Dates, day dots and rotation

Use by is a safety date. Food past its use-by date is thrown away, including food that smells fine. You do not taste it to check, and you do not trim the edge off. Selling or using it is an offence, not a judgement call.

Best before is about quality. A packet of dried pasta past its best-before date is not the same decision as ham past its use-by date. Follow your kitchen's rule, and do not stretch best-before dates on eggs: treat the date on the egg as a limit for service, and do not use eggs with damaged shells. When you are unsure which kind of date you are looking at, read the words on the pack rather than the number alone.

Once a pack is opened, the manufacturer's "use within" instruction and your day-dot rule both apply, and the earlier limit wins. A ham with three days of shelf life on the label and a two-day house rule for opened cooked meat is a two-day product from the moment it is opened. Write the date you opened it or the date it must be used, in the way your kitchen has agreed, so the closer is not decoding your handwriting at midnight.

Food you cooked yourself gets a date too. Undated cooked chicken in a gastronorm is not "from today" because you think you remember. If you cannot tell when it was made, it does not go to the pass.

Defrosting

Plan the thaw. The Food Standards Agency's preferred method is the fridge: on the bottom shelf, in a container so drips cannot reach ready-to-eat food, covered, with enough time that the centre is actually thawed before you cook. A whole chicken started at 4pm will not be ready for a 6pm service. Starting it on the worktop "just this once" puts the outside in the danger zone for hours while the inside is still frozen.

If the pack says you may cook from frozen, follow the pack. If you defrost in a microwave, cook the food immediately afterwards. Do not microwave a chicken, leave it on the side through service, and cook it at close. Do not refreeze raw food that has thawed. Food that was thawed, then cooked thoroughly, can be chilled or frozen again if your safe method allows that and you cool it properly. When you are not sure which of those you have, ask before it goes back in the freezer.

When a fridge or display reads high

Tell the person responsible for checks as soon as you see it. Do not wait for the next scheduled log "so the numbers look better". Note the time and the reading. A door that has just been open for a delivery can push the air temperature up for a short time. Your safe method may tell you to close the door and look again after about half an hour. If it is still high, the unit is not doing its job.

Move the food into another fridge that is already cold, if you have room in one. A freezer is the wrong place to park chilled ham or cream "just until the engineer arrives": it can freeze the texture, and it often sits next to raw meat. Then decide how long the food has been warm. The rules in England, Wales and Northern Ireland allow a planned stretch of service where some chilled food is warmer than 8°C, but only once, and only for four hours at most. When that clock ends, the food is binned. The stretch needs a written start time. It is not a reason to keep food from a fridge that failed overnight, and it is not something you invent because the unit "usually comes back".

If high-risk food has been above 8°C for more than four hours, it is thrown away. If you cannot show how long it has been warm, you do not guess a friendly number. You throw it away, you take the unit out of use until it is repaired, and you write the reading and the action. Food that was still frozen hard in a freezer that has now failed is a different judgement from food that has fully thawed and warmed. Call the manager rather than cooking it "so it is not wasted".

A display fridge at the counter is held to the same standard as the kitchen fridge unless your safe method has put that food on a timed four-hour display. Cakes with cream, milk in a jug, and filled sandwiches do not get a free pass because they are in sight of the customer.

Worked example

A pub kitchen is prepping Sunday lunch at 9:30. Three things happen close together. None of them is fixed by hoping the fridge will cope.

First, a tray of cooked rice for a biryani special is still steaming in a deep pot at the back of the stove. The chef wants it in the fridge so the surface is clear. The pot would sit above 8°C in the middle for hours and would warm the cooked meats on the shelf below. The rice is spread in a thin layer in two metal trays, stirred once, and left to cool on a clear bench away from the raw chicken. It is covered, labelled "biryani rice" with today's date, and refrigerated once it is no longer hot. The house target in their pack is 90 minutes. They start the clock when cooking finishes, not when someone remembers.

Second, a case of cooked ham was delivered at 9:10 and is still on the pass at 9:40 because the dry store was being counted. The packs are no longer properly cold. They do not go into the fridge to "recover", and they do not go on the carvery. The supervisor checks the delivery notes, rejects the ham, and writes the time, the temperature feel of the packs, and the supplier. The rest of the chilled delivery, which went straight into the fridge at 9:12, stays.

Third, at 13:10 the dessert fridge on the counter reads 11°C. It was loaded at noon with warm trifles that had not finished cooling, and the door has been opened for every table. The trifles come out. The fridge door is shut and the empty unit is checked again at 13:40. It is still at 9°C, so it is switched off for service and reported. The trifles have no written time for how long they were above 8°C before they went in, so they are thrown away rather than given the benefit of a four-hour display that nobody started. Cream cakes that were already cold in a different fridge, and whose log at 11:00 was 4°C, stay on sale from that other fridge.

The diary line is three sentences: rice cooled in shallow trays and in the fridge by 10:50; ham delivery rejected; dessert fridge out of use, trifles discarded, engineer called. That is the record an officer can match to the bins, the invoice and the unit.

What a manager or environmental health officer checks

Officers look at the food and the equipment, then ask the person who uses them to explain. They are not only collecting the folder.

• What temperature should this fridge be, and what did it read last? A tick in the log, with no number, does not answer the question.
• Is the probe or the in-built display something you trust? If the display says 3°C and the milk is warm, the display has lost the argument.
• Show me the raw food and the ready-to-eat food. Are they covered, separated, and dated?
• Is anything hot, or recently cooked and still warm, sitting in a fridge or on the side with no cooling method?
• Pick a tub. What does the date mean, and what happens tomorrow if it is still here?
• The freezer: is the food hard, or soft with ice crystals and liquid in the bottom? When did someone last look?
• If a unit was out of range this week, what was thrown away, what was moved, and where is that written?

A manager should be able to walk the same route without notice: every unit that holds food, the cooling trays, the dates on opened high-risk food, and a log that has gaps explained rather than filled in at the end of the week from memory. Open the chilling pages of Safer Food, Better Business and compare them with the units in front of you. Those pages only count if the fridges agree with them this afternoon.

You may be asked what you would do if you found the walk-in at 10°C at the start of your shift. The expected answer is to tell someone, protect the food, find out how long it has been warm, throw away what you cannot justify, and write it down. "I turned it down and carried on" is the answer that fails the conversation.

Check your understanding

Doing this as part of your job?

If your workplace uses Localyn, ask your manager for your personal training link — completing modules through it records the training in the store's food safety evidence automatically. Managers: issue links from the Training page in your dashboard.

Related pages

Fridge temperature logsFreezer temperature logsFridge temperature log sheetEHO readiness quizBakeries