Food Safety

The guide's food-safety and inspections entries, carried whole. This is the guide's text: not law, not a code, and not a plan.

Your jurisdiction governs. “know your jurisdiction's system (letter grades posted in the window, point scores, risk-based frequency)” Health Inspections & Crisis Management

Nothing here is saved. This is not a HACCP plan, a compliance record or an inspection log, and it does not train or certify anyone to any standard; food-handler certification is an accredited instrument and this is not one. Your written plan and your logs live elsewhere.

The numbers the guide states

These are the figures the guide gives, attributed to the entry that gives them. Your local code may set different ones, and where it does, yours governs.

The danger zone

4–60°C (40–140°F) Food Safety: The Chef-Owner's Non-Negotiables

The cooling law

Cooling law: hot food to 21°C within 2 hours, to 4°C within 4 more Food Safety: The Chef-Owner's Non-Negotiables

The temperatures above are printed exactly as the guide writes them and are never converted: this app's own converter renders 4°C as 39°F, and the guide's pair says 40°F. Where a guide and a converter disagree about a safety number, neither is worth guessing at.

Where the guide disagrees with itself

Two entries state two different danger windows. The guide does not reconcile them, and neither do we: picking a winner would be a safety judgement this app has no standing to make.

• 4–60°C (40–140°F) Food Safety: The Chef-Owner's Non-Negotiables
• 4.5–54.5°C Sous Vide Hardware: Circulators, Sealers & Safety Kit

The numbers a code states

Not the guide's figures: these are the FDA Food Code 2022 and UK Food Standards Agency figures, printed as stated and read on 5 September 2026. Where they and the guide differ, this app does not reconcile them, and where your code differs from both, yours governs.

Cold holding

FDA Food Code 2022 41°F (5°C) or below

UK Food Standards Agency 8°C or below in law; 5°C or below recommended

Hot holding

FDA Food Code 2022 135°F (57°C) or above

UK Food Standards Agency 63°C or above

Cooling cooked food

FDA Food Code 2022 135°F (57°C) to 70°F (21°C) within 2 hours, then to 41°F (5°C) within 4 more

UK Food Standards Agency no figure carried here

Reheating for hot holding

FDA Food Code 2022 165°F (74°C) for 15 seconds

UK Food Standards Agency no figure carried here

Poultry, stuffed meats and reheated leftovers

FDA Food Code 2022 165°F (74°C)

UK Food Standards Agency 75°C, or 70°C held for two minutes: one figure for everything cooked

Ground meats

FDA Food Code 2022 155°F (68°C) for 17 seconds

UK Food Standards Agency 75°C, or 70°C held for two minutes

Whole cuts of beef, pork, lamb and fish

FDA Food Code 2022 145°F (63°C) for 15 seconds

UK Food Standards Agency 75°C, or 70°C held for two minutes

Sanitiser strength

FDA Food Code 2022 chlorine 50 to 100 ppm · quaternary ammonium per the label, commonly 150 to 400 ppm · iodine 12.5 to 25 ppm

UK Food Standards Agency no figure carried here

FDA Food Code 2022: United States. Adopted state by state, with amendments and on their own schedule, so the figure your inspector holds you to may differ. UK Food Standards Agency: England, Wales and Northern Ireland regulations, and FSA cooking guidance. Scotland sets no chilled figure in law. A row with no figure from a source means this page carries none, not that the source has none.

The disciplines

The guide's own words, unabridged.

• THE DANGER ZONE 4–60°C (40–140°F), where pathogens multiply: the two-hour rule governs everything left in it. Cooling law: hot food to 21°C within 2 hours, to 4°C within 4 more (shallow pans, ice baths: never a stockpot straight into the walk-in).
• CROSS-CONTAMINATION raw below ready-to-eat in storage, color-coded boards, hands and towels as vectors.
• FIFO first in, first out: label and date everything (masking tape and a Sharpie run more restaurants than any software). HACCP is the systematized version: identify hazards, control critical points, document. Allergen protocol is service-critical and legal-critical. None of this is glamour; all of it is the license to do the glamorous parts.
• INSPECTIONS know your jurisdiction's system (letter grades posted in the window, point scores, risk-based frequency), and run the kitchen so ANY moment is inspection-ready: the food-safety entry's disciplines (temps logged, FIFO labeled, hand sinks stocked and USED, sanitizer buckets titrated) aren't inspection prep; they're the daily standard the inspection merely photographs. During the visit: accompany professionally, correct on the spot what can be, never argue, get every finding in writing; after: fix, document, retrain at pre-shift, and treat repeat findings as management failures, not staff ones. CRISIS PLAYBOOKS, written before needed: FOODBORNE-ILLNESS COMPLAINT (take it seriously and kindly, gather specifics, preserve records and product, call the insurer and, if credible, the health department yourself; the cover-up is always worse than the event), equipment catastrophe (the walk-in dies: thermometer logs decide what's saved; the insurance entry's breakdown rider decides what's paid), fire/flood (business interruption's moment), viral bad review or social-media pile-on (respond once, gracefully, factually; never brawl online), and the power outage's food-disposition rules.
• THE PRINCIPLE crises are inevitable; scandals are optional: the difference is preparation, documentation, and the instinct to protect guests first, reputation second, and ego never. A binder nobody needed is cheap; the one you needed and didn't have is the whole business.

The two entries, whole

Food Safety: The Chef-Owner's Non-Negotiables

THE DANGER ZONE: 4–60°C (40–140°F), where pathogens multiply: the two-hour rule governs everything left in it. Cooling law: hot food to 21°C within 2 hours, to 4°C within 4 more (shallow pans, ice baths: never a stockpot straight into the walk-in). CROSS-CONTAMINATION: raw below ready-to-eat in storage, color-coded boards, hands and towels as vectors. FIFO: first in, first out: label and date everything (masking tape and a Sharpie run more restaurants than any software). HACCP is the systematized version: identify hazards, control critical points, document. Allergen protocol is service-critical and legal-critical. None of this is glamour; all of it is the license to do the glamorous parts.

Health Inspections & Crisis Management

The visits and the bad days, prepared for in advance. INSPECTIONS: know your jurisdiction's system (letter grades posted in the window, point scores, risk-based frequency), and run the kitchen so ANY moment is inspection-ready: the food-safety entry's disciplines (temps logged, FIFO labeled, hand sinks stocked and USED, sanitizer buckets titrated) aren't inspection prep; they're the daily standard the inspection merely photographs. During the visit: accompany professionally, correct on the spot what can be, never argue, get every finding in writing; after: fix, document, retrain at pre-shift, and treat repeat findings as management failures, not staff ones. CRISIS PLAYBOOKS, written before needed: FOODBORNE-ILLNESS COMPLAINT (take it seriously and kindly, gather specifics, preserve records and product, call the insurer and, if credible, the health department yourself; the cover-up is always worse than the event), equipment catastrophe (the walk-in dies: thermometer logs decide what's saved; the insurance entry's breakdown rider decides what's paid), fire/flood (business interruption's moment), viral bad review or social-media pile-on (respond once, gracefully, factually; never brawl online), and the power outage's food-disposition rules. THE PRINCIPLE: crises are inevitable; scandals are optional: the difference is preparation, documentation, and the instinct to protect guests first, reputation second, and ego never. A binder nobody needed is cheap; the one you needed and didn't have is the whole business.

What the guide names and does not state

Read this as a list of places to look elsewhere: your jurisdiction, your inspector, your written plan. It is not a list of things that do not matter. The code figures above cover some of them; the guide itself still states none.

• “sanitizer buckets titrated” Buckets are to be titrated. To what concentration, the guide never says.
• “identify hazards, control critical points, document” HACCP compressed to three verbs. No critical limits, no monitoring frequency, no corrective action, no verification, no record retention.
• “the two-hour rule governs everything left in it” Cooling is given a law. Reheating and hot-holding are never given one.
• “raw below ready-to-eat in storage” Storage order is given. Safe thawing is not covered anywhere in the guide.
• “Allergen protocol is service-critical and legal-critical” Asserted twice as critical, and never specified once.
• “the power outage's food-disposition rules” A pointer to rules the guide does not contain.

Where the guide is silent it stays silent. The absence of a warning on a dish is not a statement that the dish is safe.

Built 2026-09-13. This app works offline and cannot know when a food code changes, so it does not claim to be current.