Free guide
SFBB is the Food Standards Agency's food safety management pack for small catering businesses in England and Wales — and for most cafes there it's the system your EHO expects to see. (Northern Ireland uses Safe Catering; Scotland uses CookSafe.) Here's how the pack, the diary and the 4-weekly review work, what you actually have to keep up, and where digital records fit.
Sources checked 2026-07-16 · your local authority always has the final say.
SFBB · the essentials
SFBB is FSA guidance for England and Wales; Northern Ireland uses Safe Catering, Scotland uses CookSafe.
UK food law requires every food business to have a food safety management system based on HACCP principles. For a small cafe, writing a HACCP plan from scratch is unrealistic — so the Food Standards Agency publishes Safer Food, Better Business: a ready-made system you adopt instead of writing your own.
The pack has two working parts. The safe methods pages record HOW your kitchen handles the things that can go wrong — cross-contamination, cleaning, chilling, cooking — plus a management section. You fill them in once and revisit them when something changes. The diary is the daily part: opening and closing checks, anything that went wrong and what you did about it.
Cafes use the caterers edition — Safer Food, Better Business for Caterers — which is the full pack most people mean when they say "SFBB". The FSA publishes it free: you can download the pack and the diary pages as PDFs from the FSA's SFBB pages, print the sheets you need, and reprint diary refills whenever a month runs out.
There is no paid "official book" you're missing — the printed packs and diaries floating around kitchens are the same free FSA content. If your pack is years old, download the current edition rather than photocopying the old one: the safe methods do get revised.
When an EHO visits, SFBB gives the inspection its structure. In practice three things get the attention:
Nothing in food law says the records must be on paper — what matters is that checks genuinely happen and the record is contemporaneous. The failure mode of paper SFBB is well known: the diary lives in a drawer, three busy days go unrecorded, and the night before an inspection someone backfills it.
Digital checks change the shape of the habit: the phone is already in the kitchen, each entry is time-stamped as it happens, a missed check is visible the same day rather than at the end of the month, and an out-of-range fridge temperature asks for the corrective action on the spot — building the exact evidence trail the diary is meant to hold.
Where ProCafe fits, honestly: its Procedure Builder gives you six editable starter procedures adapted from SFBB's England-and-Wales wording, which you review and publish yourself, and its daily checks play the diary's role. It is not the official FSA pack and not a complete digital replacement for it — the safe methods decisions are still yours to make and keep current.
Common questions
The legal requirement is a food safety management system based on HACCP principles. SFBB is the FSA's free, ready-made way for small catering businesses in England and Wales to meet it — you can use a different system, but SFBB is what most small cafes there use and what EHOs are used to seeing. Northern Ireland's equivalent is Safe Catering (published by the FSA in Northern Ireland); Scotland's is CookSafe, from Food Standards Scotland.
The diary is daily — opening and closing checks plus anything that went wrong. The pack itself asks for a review every four weeks, where you confirm the safe methods still match how the kitchen actually works.
From the Food Standards Agency, free — the caterers pack and the diary pages are published as PDFs on the FSA's SFBB pages (linked in the sources below). Print what you need and reprint diary refills as months run out.
No. ProCafe provides six editable starter procedures adapted from SFBB's England-and-Wales wording — you review and publish them yourself — and its daily checks and temperature logs do the diary's day-to-day job digitally. The official pack is the FSA's; the safe-methods decisions stay yours.
Yes. Food law requires that checks happen and records are kept — not that they're on paper. Digital records are widely accepted; what an inspector cares about is that entries are contemporaneous and honest. ProCafe keeps daily checks and temperature logs time-stamped as they happen, with exports when someone asks.
Keep going
Links verified 2026-07-16. Spotted something out of date? Tell us and we'll correct it.
More guides: Fridge & freezer temperatures (UK) · UK allergen rules · EHO inspections · Cleaning schedules · Food hygiene ratings · Chopping board colours · Day dots
ProCafe turns these checks into clean, time-stamped records on your team's phones — organised by site and ready to show at an inspection.
14-day free trial · no card required