A complete walkthrough of every feature in Culinary Key — built for UK food businesses managing compliance digitally. No hidden tiers, no feature add-ons — every plan includes everything below.
The core of your daily food safety routine — guided, logged, and always audit-ready.
Start every shift the right way. Your team works through a guided checklist of safety tasks — fridge temperatures, food storage, equipment checks — before service begins. Every completion is time-stamped and logged against the staff member who did it.
End each day with confidence. Closing checks guide your team through food storage, equipment shutdown, and end-of-service safety tasks. Managers can see at a glance whether close-down was completed properly — before they leave or from home.
Assign daily cleaning tasks to your team — surfaces, equipment, areas — and track completion in real time. Staff mark tasks done as they go; everything is logged with who cleaned what and when, giving you a clear record of daily hygiene standards.
Set up recurring deep clean tasks on weekly or multi-week cycles — hood cleaning, cold store deep cleans, drain cleaning — so nothing gets missed over time. Tasks appear automatically on the assigned day in the correct week of the cycle.
Some tasks are easier to show than to describe. Any checklist task can carry an optional photo — the cleaned extraction hood, the emptied cold store, the corrected label — attached to the completion record and visible later in your audit trail. It is never required and never blocks a save.
Accurate temperature records are one of the first things an inspector checks. Culinary Key makes logging them effortless.
Log food temperatures during cooking, cooling, and service — exactly as required by the Safer Food Better Business approach. Each entry records the food item, temperature, time, and staff member. Pass/fail thresholds are configurable per food type.
Record ambient temperatures for all refrigeration units on your Location. Set individual target ranges for each unit — any reading outside that range is flagged immediately so your team can take action before food safety is compromised.
Food safety is only half of what an inspector or an insurer will ask about. These checks belong to the premises, so each one covers every site at that location.
Track the safety obligations that sit alongside food hygiene — fire alarm tests, emergency lighting, extinguisher checks, gas and electrical inspections, water temperature and welfare. Build your register from a library of real obligations, each with a suggested starting interval you adjust to your own risk assessment.
A separate checklist for the checks a manager should run through, held at Location level rather than per site. Set up the tasks once for the premises, and managers work through them and sign off — with the same time-stamping, audit trail, and optional photo proof as the daily checks.
When an inspector arrives, you need everything in one place. Culinary Key builds that record automatically, every day.
Every check completed in Culinary Key — opening, closing, cleaning, and temperature — is stored in your audit trail automatically from day one. No manual filing, no paper diaries. When an inspector asks for records, hand them over in seconds.
See which checks actually got done, across every site and every check type, over whatever period you choose. The report understands that sites close — days a site wasn't trading don't count against it — so what you're looking at is a fair picture rather than a misleading one.
Store and manage your HACCP safe method documents directly in Culinary Key. Create safe methods for cooking processes, cooling procedures, reheating, defrosting, and more — and make them available to your whole team in one place, replacing the printed HACCP folder.
Log every incoming delivery with structured records — supplier, date, order reference, temperature on arrival, and the staff member who accepted it. Every delivery is accounted for, traceable, and ready to present to an inspector without digging through paper.
Keep a record of every official visit in one place. Log each inspection with the date, inspecting authority, the inspector, your FHRS rating, and the outcome — pass, improvement required, or fail. Track how your rating changes over time and walk into the next visit knowing exactly where you stand.
Give an environmental health officer or a third-party auditor their own read-only login to your compliance records. They see what they need and nothing else — no ability to edit, complete, or delete anything — so you are not handing over a manager's account or standing over someone's shoulder with a tablet.
Download everything Culinary Key holds for your business as a single archive — every record and every uploaded file. Your waste logs, delivery notes, and accident records carry obligations that outlast any subscription, so taking your data with you is a button, not a support request.
Tools for the parts of food safety management that go beyond the daily routine.
Log the 14 major UK allergens across your menu items and products. Give your team a reliable reference during service and demonstrate due diligence to inspectors. Records are stored per Location and updated easily as your menu changes throughout the year.
Every cleaning chemical in your kitchen needs a COSHH assessment, and "it's in a folder somewhere" is not an answer an inspector accepts. Record each product with what it's used for, its hazards, the PPE required, how to handle and store it, and what to do if something goes wrong.
Record food waste events — spoilage, overproduction, temperature failures — with the item, quantity, reason, and date. Waste logs support food cost management and provide documented corrective action when a temperature failure or storage issue causes a loss.
Record food safety incidents, accidents, and near-misses with a full account of what happened, who was involved, and what corrective action was taken. Legally required documentation — kept safe, organised, and ready if an inspector or insurer asks to see it.
Keep on top of the less glamorous side of running a food business — pests, maintenance, and contractor contacts.
Log pest control visits, findings, and treatments. Record contractor details, the date of each visit, what was found or done, and when the next visit is due. Inspectors routinely ask for pest control evidence — Culinary Key means you always have it ready.
Track equipment maintenance, repairs, and servicing across your Location. Log the item, the issue, who carried out the work, and when it was resolved. Demonstrates that your kitchen is properly maintained — important evidence for both inspectors and insurers.
Keep all your key contacts — suppliers, pest control contractors, maintenance engineers, environmental health — in one place per Location. When something needs sorting fast, your team isn't searching through old emails or scraps of paper pinned to the wall.
Food safety is a team effort. Culinary Key helps you train your staff, tell them what's changed, and keep a record that proves it.
Record training completed by each member of your team — food hygiene certificates, allergen awareness, manual handling — and issue internal training certificates directly from the platform. Know at a glance who has been trained, in what, and when renewal is due.
Training your team can actually do, on the device already in their hand. Work through the training modules published by Culinary Key, or write your own covering the things only your kitchen does — your procedures, your equipment, your suppliers. Completion is recorded against the staff member automatically.
Run a structured food safety induction for new team members using the built-in new starter flow. Cover food safety basics, allergen awareness, and Location-specific procedures — and record completion so you have evidence from day one of employment.
Push a notice to every site at once, or just the ones it affects — a recipe change, a supplier swap, a new procedure. Send it as a message, or as a task that each staff member has to acknowledge, so you have a record that the team was actually told rather than a hopeful note by the pass.
Culinary Key prompts you to complete a monthly review of your food safety management — covering whether your procedures are working, whether any incidents occurred, and what (if anything) needs updating. Monthly reviews are a core requirement of the SFBB approach.
Whether you run one Location or many, Culinary Key is built to scale with you without adding complexity.
Manage multiple Locations from a single Culinary Key account. Each Location has its own staff, checklists, and compliance records — completely independent of one another. Switch between Locations from your dashboard in one click, with no juggling between logins.
A van, a market stall, or a unit you run for three weeks of the summer still has to keep records — but it isn't a second premises and shouldn't be priced like one. Add vehicles and temporary sites to a Location and they run the same checklists, schedules, and audit trail as your kitchen.
Give each team member the right level of access for their role. Staff complete their daily tasks; managers reach settings, reports, and records for their Location; admins and the account owner handle billing, owners, and account-wide settings. Nobody sees more than they need to.
Kitchens don't all work the same way. Where the team shares one tablet by the pass, staff pick their name from a list when they complete a check. Where everyone has their own login, their name is stamped on the record automatically — no list, no picking the wrong name, no guessing later who actually did it.
Culinary Key tells you when something needs attention rather than waiting for you to go looking. Get alerted to a critical temperature failure or a reportable accident as it happens, and a weekly summary of how your Locations are tracking — so a missed check surfaces in days, not at the next inspection.
Every kitchen is different. Culinary Key lets you build checklists around your actual daily routine — add, remove, and reorder tasks for opening, closing, cleaning, and temperature checks. Your checklist reflects your kitchen, not a generic template.
