How to write a HACCP plan — and when you don't have to

Every food business must put in place a food safety management system based on HACCP principles — that's Article 5 of assimilated Regulation (EC) 852/2004, and it applies to a one-person coffee cart as much as to a factory. What differs is proportionality: the documentation has to match the risk and scale of what you do, not a template's page count.

For most cafes in England and Wales the practical answer is Safer Food, Better Business — the FSA's ready-made HACCP-based pack — rather than a bespoke plan (Northern Ireland uses Safe Catering; Scotland uses CookSafe). A bespoke written plan becomes the right tool when your processes go beyond what the pack covers: manufacturing for other businesses, vacuum packing or sous vide, cook-chill at scale, or an EHO asking for more than the pack's safe methods.

Every HACCP plan — one page or fifty — is these seven steps applied to your kitchen:

Start with a flow diagram of your real process — delivery, storage, preparation, cooking, holding, service — and group menu items by process (cook-and-serve, cook-chill-reheat, ready-to-eat assembly) rather than writing a page per dish. Then build the hazard table: one row per step, with the hazard, the control, whether it's a CCP, the limit, the monitoring, and the corrective action.

The FSA's free MyHACCP web tool walks you through exactly this structure and produces the documented plan at the end — it's aimed at small food manufacturers, and it's the best free starting point when a cafe genuinely needs a bespoke plan.

Searches for a "HACCP plan for a restaurant" or a food truck template all resolve to the same skeleton: what changes is the flow diagram, not the principles. A food truck adds water supply, power failure and transport steps; a bakery adds allergen cross-contact and cooling as the load-bearing hazards; sous vide is its own specialist case with validated time-temperature listings, and usually a conversation with your EHO before you start.

That's also why a bought generic PDF, filled in once and filed, tends to fail at inspection: 'confidence in management' is scored on whether the system matches how the kitchen actually runs — a template describing someone else's kitchen doesn't.

Principles 4 and 5 are where a plan lives or dies day to day: monitoring records and corrective actions, kept as they happen. Time-stamped digital checks make that habit visible — the fridge log, the out-of-range reading, and what was done about it, on the same entry.

Where ProCafe fits: its Procedure Builder gives cafes 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 monitoring-record job. It is not a HACCP authoring service and it doesn't make the hazard-analysis decisions: those stay yours, documented in your plan or your pack.