Home Bakery Food Hygiene Records

Registering and the first inspection

Food businesses in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, including home-based ones, must register with their local council at least 28 days before they start trading. Registration is free. If you are unsure whether a few Instagram orders, a craft fair table or cakes for friends of friends amount to a business, ask the council; they would rather hear from you early than find you later.

Once registered, you can expect an inspection at some point. The EHO will look at the kitchen itself, how you store ingredients, how you clean, how you handle allergens, and what records you keep. Food law requires procedures based on HACCP principles, with records kept. For most home bakers that means an SFBB pack, or something similar, plus a small folder of the sheets below.

Sharing a kitchen with the household

The family fridge is the first thing an inspector tends to open. Business ingredients such as butter, cream cheese, eggs and fresh fruit need a shelf, or a whole fridge, kept apart from the household’s leftovers and raw meat. The FSA recommends fridges set to 5°C or below, and in England, Wales and Northern Ireland chilled food must not be kept above 8°C. A domestic fridge opened every ten minutes by teenagers looking for snacks may struggle with both.

The fridge temperature record sheet takes a morning and evening reading for up to two fridges and a freezer. Even if you only bake three days a week, record those days and write "no baking" on the others, so gaps have an explanation.

• Keep pets out of the kitchen while you bake, and their bowls, beds and food off the worktops at all times.
• Children and visitors should not be in the kitchen during business baking; if that is unrealistic, bake when they are out or asleep.
• Store business ingredients in labelled, lidded containers in a separate cupboard, so nobody borrows the ground almonds for a crumble.
• Wash and disinfect worktops before starting, not after the family has finished dinner on them.
• Keep a separate set of cloths, tea towels and aprons for business use, laundered hot.

The cleaning schedule has daily, weekly and monthly sheets with a tick box per day or week. Add home-specific tasks to the blank rows, such as "pet bowls moved out", "business shelf in fridge wiped" or "mixer and piping nozzles disinfected".

Cream, custard and cooling

Plain sponges, biscuits and bread are forgiving. Fresh cream, custard, crème pât, cream cheese frosting, mousse and fresh fruit toppings are not: they need the fridge, and so does anything filled with them. Plan your fridge space before taking a large order, because a three-tier cake takes up more room than you think.

Cooling matters too. Custards, fruit compotes and cooked fillings should be cooled as quickly as possible, for example in a shallow tray, and then refrigerated. The FSA publishes no fixed cooling time. The cooking, cooling and reheating record lets you write down the core temperature when cooked, when a batch came off the heat and when it went into the fridge, which is useful evidence for fillings made a day ahead. Savoury bakes such as quiches or sausage rolls should reach one of the FSA core cooking combinations, such as 75°C for 30 seconds.

Checking any of that needs a probe you can trust. The FSA says a digital probe should read between -1°C and 1°C in iced water and between 99°C and 101°C in boiling water. The probe thermometer check record takes about two minutes a month.

Allergens and labelling pre-wrapped bakes

Baking is allergen-heavy by nature. Almost everything contains cereals containing gluten, eggs or milk, and many recipes add tree nuts, peanuts, soya or sesame. UK businesses must be able to declare the 14 allergens, and customers ordering cakes for children’s parties will ask.

A 14 allergens matrix puts every product against every allergen, with a mark for may-contain where equipment or suppliers make cross-contact likely. Update it the day you change a recipe or swap a brand of chocolate chips.

If you wrap bakes before the customer chooses them, for example brownies in cellophane at a farm shop or cookies in labelled bags, they may count as food prepacked for direct sale. Since 1 October 2021 (Natasha’s Law), that food must be labelled with its name and a full ingredients list with the allergens emphasised, for example in bold. Whether your products count depends on how and when they are packed, so ask your council if you are unsure which category they fall into.

Training, even for a one-person business

Food handlers must be supervised and trained to suit the work they do. A certificate is not a legal requirement, but you must be able to show your training was adequate, and many home bakers take a Level 2 food hygiene course as the simplest way to do that. The food hygiene training record lists the course, date and refresher due date, and covers anyone who helps out at busy times.

Getting the sheets

You can keep all of this in a notebook if you rule the columns carefully. The UK edition of The Kitchen Log Kit has the six sheets above, plus delivery, hot holding and opening and closing records, as A4 PDFs with Excel versions where a spreadsheet helps. It records what you check; your council and your own procedures decide what that has to be.