COSHH Register
COSHH stands for Control of Substances Hazardous to Health. Your register lists every hazardous substance you keep, and how to use it safely.
Like safe methods and allergens, the register is held once for the whole account rather than per Area, so every Location shares it. If your sites stock genuinely different chemicals, list them all — a register covering every product across the business is more useful than one that is silent about the site you happen not to be standing in.
What Goes In It
Anything hazardous you store or use:
- Degreasers and oven cleaners
- Sanitisers and disinfectants
- Descalers
- Dishwasher and glasswasher chemicals
- Drain cleaners
- Floor cleaners
- Bleach
If it carries a hazard symbol on the label, it belongs here. Washing-up liquid generally does not; the concentrated chemical the glasswasher doses from certainly does.
Recording a Substance
For each product, record:
- Product name — as it appears on the container, e.g. "Flash Multi-Surface Cleaner"
- What it is used for — e.g. "Cleaning kitchen surfaces"
- PPE required — e.g. "Gloves, goggles"
- Storage instructions — e.g. "Store in a cool, dry place away from food"
- Category and status
Use the name on the actual container. Staff match what they are holding against your register, and they cannot do that if the register lists a product name nobody uses.
Safety Data Sheets
Your supplier must provide a safety data sheet for each product. Keep them with the register.
The data sheet is where the detail lives — what the chemical does on skin, in eyes, if swallowed, and what to do about each. In an incident nobody reads a data sheet from cover to cover; they need the answer in seconds. Having it filed and findable is the entire point.
Storage
The two rules that matter most:
Never store chemicals above or next to food, including packaging and clean equipment. A leaking container contaminates everything below it.
Never decant into an unlabelled container, and never into a food container. A degreaser in an unmarked squash bottle is how someone gets seriously hurt, and it is one of the fastest ways to fail an inspection outright.
Why It Is Really Kept
An inspector will check whether you have a register. That is not the reason it matters.
The reason is that a kitchen porter on their first week may reach for the wrong bottle, mix two chemicals that should never meet, or use a concentrate neat. Your register — and the training that goes with it — is what stops that. Chlorine bleach and an acidic descaler together produce chlorine gas in a small, warm, badly ventilated room, and people have died in exactly that situation.
Keeping It Current
Update the register when you change supplier or product. Chemical ranges get reformulated and renamed constantly, and a register describing the products you bought three years ago protects nobody.
Archive products you no longer hold rather than deleting them, so the record of what was in the building at a given time survives.