Kitchen labels

Build the working day around your Irish food-safety system. FSAI's Safe Catering pack separates delivery, refrigeration, cooking and cooling, hot display, hygiene and staff records. Choose the activities your cafe actually carries out, then keep the observations and decisions together for your environmental health officer.

1. Use internal preparation labels to identify the food and the dates established by your own safe method. Do not turn a default shelf life into a claim that every recipe is safe for that duration.
2. Check ingredient and allergen information against the current supplier specifications. Keep the label and menu matrix aligned when a recipe changes.
3. Assess consumer packaging separately from an internal kitchen label. The information needed for a takeaway product can differ from a label used only to organise preparation in the kitchen.

• FSAI: Safe Catering pack ↗

Kitchen labels are operational labels for your own kitchen: prepared, opened and defrosted day dots plus discard-by labels, carrying the product name, dates, storage instructions, staff initials, the allergen summary and an optional delivery-lot reference. Kitchen labels are part of ProCafe Pro.

1. Open Kitchen labels → Library and add each product.
2. Set the shelf life for each label type you use — prepared, opened, defrosted — in hours or days. ProCafe never invents an expiry: a label type without a shelf life you set simply cannot be printed.
3. Add the allergens (and may-contain) so the label carries an accurate summary.

Staff pick the product and label type; the preview shows exactly what the label will read before anything is printed. Labels download as PDFs sized for compatible A4 label sheets (including the 21-up L7160 layout) and common thermal label sizes — no proprietary hardware is required.

• On A4 sheets, choose a start position to use up a partly-used sheet — printing continues from that slot.
• Staff initials are taken from the signed-in user and can be edited at print time.
• If a product has no allergens recorded, the label prints a “see allergen matrix” line instead of implying it is allergen-free.

A label can reference a delivery lot from your traceability records. If the lot’s use-by date is earlier than the computed discard date, the label is shortened to the lot’s date automatically — the preview flags this as it happens, so it is never a surprise at the printer.

• Every print is kept as a frozen, unchangeable record — who printed it, when, and exactly what it said.
• Reprints reproduce the original label exactly from that record; only output settings like the sheet format or start position can change.
• An EXPIRED label is never reprinted — if the discard moment has passed, the reprint is refused and you print a fresh label instead.
• “Doesn’t fit this label size” means the text genuinely cannot fit the chosen format at a readable size — ProCafe refuses to shrink or truncate a food-safety label. Shorten the product name or storage instructions, or pick a larger format.

• Allergen matrix guide
• Suppliers & deliveries guide
• Kitchen labels — feature overview