Food Hygiene Records for Market Stalls

Register before you trade

Food businesses in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, including market stalls and vans, must register with their local council at least 28 days before they start trading. Registration is free, and it is how the council knows to inspect you. Market organisers and event licensing teams often ask to see proof, along with your insurance and your food hygiene rating if you already have one.

Stalls move. You might trade at a Saturday market in one town, a Sunday car-boot in another and a festival two counties away. If you work across several areas, ask the council which one should hold your registration, and expect officers from any area you trade in to look at your set-up. Keep your records in the van, not in the kitchen at home, so they travel with you.

Cool boxes, portable fridges and deliveries

Chilled food on a stall usually lives in a cool box, an electric coolbox, or a small fridge running off a leisure battery or generator. None of these behave like a kitchen fridge. The FSA recommends fridges set to 5°C or below, and in England, Wales and Northern Ireland it is an offence to keep chilled food above 8°C, with some exceptions. A cool box with melted ice packs at two in the afternoon may be neither.

• Pre-chill cool boxes overnight and pack them full; an empty cool box warms up faster.
• Use plenty of frozen ice packs, and swap them for fresh ones midway through a long day.
• Keep a probe or a fridge thermometer inside each box, and check it when you set up, at lunchtime and before packing down.
• Shade the boxes. A cool box in full sun on tarmac is losing a battle.

The fridge temperature record sheet has AM and PM columns for two units and a freezer; on a stall, label them "cool box 1", "cool box 2" and "van freezer" and use the action column for midday readings. If stock comes to the stall directly from a wholesaler, or you collect it on the way, the food delivery record sheet records who supplied it, the chilled reading, packaging and use-by dates. The FSA advises rejecting chilled or frozen food that has not been kept cold enough and noting it down.

Hot holding on a stall

Street food traders often cook in batches and keep food warm in bain-maries, chafing dishes, soup kettles or insulated boxes. Hot food kept for service must be held at 63°C or above. It can drop below that for up to 2 hours, once only; after that, reheat it until piping hot, chill it, or throw it away.

Outdoors, hot holding fights the weather. Wind strips heat from open trays, and a gas burner on low can go out without anyone noticing. The hot holding record sheet gives each dish a time in, four timed checks in °C and a column for when it came out. On a busy pitch, set a timer on your phone for the checks, and stir before probing so the reading reflects the whole tray, not just the edge.

Handwashing and cleaning without plumbing

Most pitches have no sink. Traders solve this with a portable handwash unit, or a large container of warm water with a tap, a bowl beneath it, liquid soap and paper towels. Hand gel is not a substitute for washing: it does not remove grease or food residue. Keep handwashing separate from washing equipment, and bring more water than you think you need.

Cleaning on a stall mostly means working surfaces, utensils, chopping boards and the probe itself, with a food-safe disinfectant used at the contact time on its label. Bring enough clean utensils to swap rather than wash them on site where possible. The cleaning schedule has daily, weekly and monthly sheets; add stall tasks such as "gazebo sides wiped", "water containers emptied and rinsed" and "cool boxes disinfected" to the blank rows. The opening and closing checks cover setting up and packing down, with a tick per day and the initials of whoever checked.

Allergen questions at the counter

Customers ask about allergens more at markets than almost anywhere else, because there is no printed menu and they are talking to the person who made the food. UK food businesses must be able to declare 14 allergens: celery, cereals containing gluten, crustaceans, eggs, fish, lupin, milk, molluscs, mustard, peanuts, sesame, soya, sulphur dioxide and sulphites, and tree nuts.

Guessing is not an answer. Keep a 14 allergens matrix on the stall, with every product against every allergen, and update it the day a recipe or an ingredient brand changes. If you wrap food before the customer chooses it, such as sandwiches, flapjacks or bags of fudge, that may be food prepacked for direct sale, which needs a full ingredients label with allergens emphasised. Check with your council if you are unsure which side of that line your stall sits on.

Getting the sheets

You can draw these tables by hand in a notebook. If you would rather print them, the UK edition of The Kitchen Log Kit has all six sheets above as A4 PDFs, plus cooking, probe check and training records, with Excel versions where a spreadsheet helps. The sheets record what you check. Your council, and your own procedures, decide what that has to be.