Register a food business in Ireland and write a HACCP plan

Register your food business with the competent authority before you trade, then write a food safety management system based on HACCP principles and keep the records that show you follow it. In practice that means a registration form, a plan of about ten pages for a small kitchen, and a handful of logs filled in every day. Inspectors read the records first, because a record is proof, and a plan nobody follows is not.

Who do you register with, and what does it cost you to wait?

Every food business operator has to register before starting to trade. Most restaurants, cafes, takeaways and food trucks register with the environmental health service of the HSE, and the Food Safety Authority of Ireland keeps the list of which authority covers which type of business. The form asks who you are, where you operate, what you make and sell, and roughly how many people you employ. Keep the confirmation: it is the first thing an inspector asks for.

Register again, or tell the authority, when something material changes: new premises, a new owner, a new activity such as starting a catering arm, or a mobile unit that moves between counties.

What does HACCP mean for a small kitchen?

HACCP stands for hazard analysis and critical control points. It is a method, and for a small kitchen it comes down to answering six plain questions on paper.

1. What can go wrong? List the hazards in each dish: raw chicken cross-contaminating salad, a rice dish left warm, an allergen reaching the wrong plate.
2. Where do you stop it? Cooking to a safe core temperature, chilling quickly, keeping raw and ready-to-eat apart. These are your control points.
3. What are the limits? Write the number or the rule, for example the temperature a fridge must hold.
4. How do you check? Who reads the thermometer, and when.
5. What do you do when it fails? The corrective action, written before the problem happens.
6. How do you prove it? The record.

Write it in your own words for your own menu. A generic template downloaded from a supplier, with dishes you do not make, fails the moment an inspector asks you to walk through it.

Which records should you keep every day?

Keep few records and keep them honestly. A short daily routine that is actually done beats a thick folder that is filled in on Friday afternoon.

• Temperatures. Fridges, freezers and hot holding, morning and evening. The fridge and freezer log in this guide gives you the columns.
• Deliveries. Check chilled goods on arrival, and note who signed.
• Cooking and cooling. Core temperature for the dishes you cook to order, and cooling times for anything batch-cooked.
• Cleaning. A schedule with initials, signed off by whoever closes.
• Training. Who was trained in what, and when. Food handlers need training in proportion to the work they do, and a short briefing on day one counts only if you wrote it down.
• Allergens. Your allergen information for every dish and the date it was last checked. The allergen guide covers it.

Download the fridge and freezer temperature log (spreadsheet, CSV)

The log is a spreadsheet you print. Fill in your target temperatures from your own plan and your authority's advice, not from ours.

What happens at an inspection?

An inspector can arrive unannounced during opening hours. They look at the premises, how food is stored and handled, the cleaning, the people, and the records. If something is wrong they tell you what and by when, and they follow up. Serious or repeated problems can lead to enforcement action, which can include closure orders for the worst cases.

Treat the visit as a free audit. Ask what they would do about the awkward corner you have never solved; inspectors see hundreds of kitchens and usually know a cheap fix.

What do inspectors find most often?

The same few things turn up in kitchen after kitchen, which makes them cheap to fix before anyone visits:

• No hand wash basin that is actually usable. A basin with a mop bucket in it, or no soap, is a finding on its own.
• Raw and ready-to-eat food stored together. Raw meat above salad in the walk-in is the classic.
• Missing or incomplete records. A temperature log with a week of identical numbers reads as made up.
• Out-of-date or unlabelled food. Decant containers need a name and a date.
• Staff with no training record. The cook may be excellent, but if nothing is written down you cannot prove it.

Walk your own kitchen once a week with a notepad, as if you were the inspector, and fix what you write down.

How do you keep the system alive?

Review the plan every time you change the menu, a supplier, a piece of equipment or the layout. Give one person (a named sous chef or the manager) the job of checking that the records are complete each week. Put the next review date on the front page.

Training is the other half. The new starter checklist puts the food safety briefing on day one, where it belongs, and the Mosey Courses feature has food safety courses your team can take on their phones.

If you are still planning the venue, go back to the opening checklist to see where registration sits in the order of things. Once you are trading, cutting food waste is the next place that records pay for themselves.