Choosing food safety software for a cafe: what matters, what doesn't

The job is contemporaneous records: opening and closing checks completed on a phone in the kitchen, fridge and freezer temperatures logged as they're read, corrective actions captured next to the reading that triggered them, an allergen matrix staff can check at the counter, and delivery records with an explicit accepted-or-rejected outcome.

What it does not do: run the kitchen, write your safe methods, or improve anything by itself. A cafe with great software and backfilled entries is worse off than a cafe with an honest paper diary — inspectors read records for credibility first.

When you compare tools, these are the differences that show up months later:

UK tools in this category are typically priced as a monthly subscription per site, most landing in the tens of pounds per month; sensor hardware, where offered, costs extra with every vendor. ProCafe's UK pricing at the time of writing is £19 per month plus £10 per additional location, with a 14-day free trial that doesn't ask for a card.

The real cost question isn't the subscription — it's adoption. A tool staff complete in seconds gets used daily and builds a record an inspector can trust; a tool they avoid produces gaps, and gaps are what inspections notice.

Fourteen days is enough to answer all of these:

ProCafe is built for cafes specifically: daily checks and temperature logs designed for counter service, six editable starter procedures adapted from SFBB's England-and-Wales wording that you review and publish yourself, an allergen matrix with a may-contain state, and delivery records where acceptance or rejection is an explicit choice with a correction trail — no silent edits.

It is not the official FSA pack, it doesn't write your hazard analysis, and it makes no promises about scores. What it commits to is the part software can honestly own: records that are contemporaneous, complete, and easy to show.