Free guide
Safe Catering is the Food Safety Authority of Ireland's ready-made food safety management pack for catering businesses — the Irish counterpart to the UK's SFBB. Here's how it's structured, the records it expects, and the temperatures that anchor it.
Sources checked 2026-07-09 · your local authority always has the final say.
Ireland · the key numbers
Figures per FSAI guidance. HSE environmental health officers inspect food businesses in Ireland.
EU food law (Regulation 852/2004) requires food businesses to run a food safety management system based on HACCP principles. For small catering businesses, the FSAI publishes Safe Catering — a pack that turns those principles into ready-made safe practices and record sheets, so a cafe doesn't have to write a HACCP plan from scratch.
The pack covers the day's real hazards — delivery and storage, preparation, cooking, cooling, reheating, hot holding, cleaning — with a record sheet structure that documents checks as they happen. When an HSE environmental health officer inspects, those records are the evidence your system is really running.
Safe Catering's expectations map to a familiar daily rhythm:
Nothing in Irish or EU food law requires the records to be on paper — what matters is that checks genuinely happen and the record is honest and available. The same failure mode SFBB suffers in the UK applies here: the sheet in the folder goes unfilled on the busy days that matter most.
Digital checks on the kitchen phone keep each entry time-stamped as it happens, prompt the corrective action when a reading is out of range, and export cleanly when an inspector asks — the Safe Catering record structure, without the paper chase. ProCafe ships Irish defaults out of the box: 5 °C fridge targets, 63 °C hot holding, and FSAI-aligned starter checklists.
Common questions
The legal requirement is a HACCP-based food safety management system (EU Regulation 852/2004). Safe Catering is the FSAI's ready-made way for catering businesses to meet it — you may use another system, but Safe Catering is the pack Irish environmental health officers know best.
FSAI guidance recommends keeping chilled food at 5 °C or below. Hot food held for service should stay at 63 °C or above, and reheated food should reach a core temperature of at least 70 °C.
Environmental health officers of the HSE (Health Service Executive) carry out inspections, under service contract to the FSAI, which is the national coordinating authority. Registration of a new food business is also made to the HSE.
Keep going
Links verified 2026-07-09. Spotted something out of date? Tell us and we'll correct it.
More guides: Irish cafe records
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