Guide
SFBB pack or full HACCP: which software do you need?
Updated
Software in this market splits along a line most buyers do not see until the demo: does it hold your plan, or does it only run the checks that come from one?
Talk to a specialist Eight products, six criteria, every cell traceable to the page it came from and the date we read it.
What the law asks you to have
A food safety management system based on HACCP principles, under retained Regulation (EC) 852/2004, Article 5. gov.uk puts the choice of shape this way: "The type of food safety management system you need depends on the size of your business and its risk level and complexity", and recommends contacting your local food safety team, who will assess your business and advise (gov.uk).
The two routes
- Safer Food, Better Business
- The Food Standards Agency's toolkit for small catering businesses such as restaurants, cafes and takeaways, covering cross-contamination, cleaning, chilling, cooking and management, with a diary at its centre. CookSafe is the Scottish equivalent and Safe Catering is used in Northern Ireland.
- A full HACCP plan
- gov.uk describes this as "a more detailed part of food safety management" with formal hazard analysis, critical control points, monitoring procedures and detailed records, and says your local food safety team might advise it if your business is larger or higher-risk. The FSA's MyHACCP service and its HACCP plan templates are the free routes to building one.
Which products do which
- Builds the plan for you: FoodDocs, from its Standard tier, advertises creating a HACCP plan in an hour with customisable content and automatically generated standard operating procedures. Safefood 360 has dedicated HACCP and food safety plan modules, at manufacturing scale.
- Holds a plan you already have, and runs the checks: Trail, Checkit, Monika and Shield Safety RiskProof are all built around digitised tasks, checks and records. Shield Safety describes covering kitchen HACCP routines and allergen checks with food processes built on HACCP principles.
- Writes the plan as a service: Food Alert lists HACCP management in the software and HACCP development, described as systems tailored to your business, as a consultancy service alongside it. Kelsius presents FoodCheck 2.0 as digital HACCP with the records built in.
None of these products is a legal shortcut. Whatever the software generates, the system has to describe what actually happens in your kitchen, and it is your local authority that decides whether it does.
Questions that separate the two on a demo
- Ask to see the hazard analysis, not the dashboard. If there isn't one in the product, the plan lives somewhere else.
- Ask what happens when you add a process the template did not anticipate, such as sous vide or vacuum packing.
- Ask how corrective actions are recorded, and show me one from a real deviation.
- Ask what an environmental health officer sees: a printed export, a shared link, or a login you have to hand over.
- Ask how records are retained if you cancel, and in what format.
Digitising is not the same as improving
A diary that was being back-filled on paper will be back-filled in an app, unless the system makes the check easier at the moment it should happen. That is why the sensor-led products exist: they take the human out of the most repetitive check entirely. For everything that still needs a person, the honest test on a demo is whether a busy chef would do it at 7pm on a Friday.