Chopping board colours: the convention, and the rules behind it

Most UK catering suppliers sell the same six-colour set, and most kitchens use it the same way: red for raw meat and poultry, blue for raw fish, yellow for cooked meat, green for salad and fruit, brown for vegetables, and white for bakery and dairy. Colour makes the right board the easy choice mid-service and makes the wrong one visible across the kitchen.

Because it's a convention rather than a regulation, variations exist — some kitchens add purple for allergen-controlled prep. Whatever mapping you use, it only works when everyone uses the same one: label the rack, put the mapping in training, and keep a poster where boards are stored.

UK food law doesn't name colours. The controls that matter — set out in the FSA's E. coli O157 cross-contamination guidance — are separation and hygiene: work areas, surfaces and equipment used for raw food must be adequately separated from those for ready-to-eat food, and where the same equipment must serve both, it needs cleaning and disinfection that actually works (heat disinfection in a commercial dishwasher is the benchmark for boards and utensils).

Colour coding is one good way to make separation stick in practice — which is why EHOs like to see it — but a kitchen with immaculate colours and a shared, unwashed knife still fails the control that counts.