Guide
Digital temperature monitoring and probe integration
Updated
Temperature is the check most food businesses record most often, so it is the one automation pays back on first. It is also where the hardware bill hides.
Talk to a specialist Eight products, six criteria, every cell traceable to the page it came from and the date we read it.
Three different things get called temperature monitoring
- Manual logging in an app
- A person takes a reading and types it in. The gain is legibility, timestamps and no lost paper. Trail's use-cases publish fridge and freezer, hot food and cellar temperature log sheets in this shape.
- Bluetooth probe capture
- A person takes the reading with a probe and the app captures it without typing. Kelsius states that probes transmit food temperatures via Bluetooth; Food Alert describes Bluetooth temperature checking of food storage.
- Continuous wireless sensors
- The equipment is monitored around the clock, with alerting on deviation and no human in the loop. Kelsius describes wireless sensors transmitting encrypted data to a local network controller; Checkit describes industrial-grade sensors automating fridge and freezer logging; Monika describes continuous monitoring of cold storage and hot holding with instant alerts.
What the law asks for, and what it does not
It does not ask for sensors. Retained Regulation (EC) 852/2004, Article 5 requires effective monitoring at critical control points and "documents and records commensurate with the nature and size of the food business". Annex II asks premises to provide temperature-controlled storage "designed to allow those temperatures to be monitored and, where necessary, recorded". A calibrated probe and a paper diary satisfy that. What automation changes is the labour and the gaps, not the legal position.
The numbers your system should alert against
- 8 °C chilled. gov.uk states that chilled food must be kept at 8 °C or below and that this is a legal requirement in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and recommended in Scotland (gov.uk).
- 5 °C fridge setting. gov.uk advises setting the fridge to 5 °C or below so food stays cold enough even when the temperature moves. Alerting at 8 °C leaves you no headroom.
- 63 °C hot holding. Schedule 4 of the Food Safety and Hygiene (England) Regulations 2013 makes it an offence to hold cooked food for service or display below 63 °C where that is needed to control pathogens.
- 82 °C on reheat, in Scotland only. Schedule 4 of the Food Hygiene (Scotland) Regulations 2006 requires reheated food to reach at least 82 °C. If you operate across the border, check the system lets you set different limits by site.
What to ask before you buy hardware
- What does each monitored unit cost, and how many gateways or controllers does my site need?
- Is installation included, and who is responsible if a probe is fitted badly?
- How is calibration handled, how often, and what does it cost after year one?
- What happens to the data when the internet drops: does the sensor buffer readings, or is the record lost?
- Who receives an out-of-hours alert, and what happens if nobody acknowledges it?
- Can I still record a manual probe reading in the same system when a sensor is being serviced?
The buffering question is the one that separates a monitoring system from an expensive thermometer. A gap in an automated record is harder to explain than a gap in a paper one, because nobody was there to write anything down.
Corrective actions matter more than readings
Article 5(2)(e) of retained 852/2004 requires "establishing corrective actions when monitoring indicates that a critical control point is not under control". A system that captures thousands of in-range readings and nothing about the morning the walk-in failed is the weaker document. Ask to see what the record looks like on a day something went wrong, not on a day everything was fine.