Safe Methods
A Safe Method describes how a particular risk is controlled in your kitchen — what is done, by whom, and what happens when it goes wrong.
Shared Across the Business
Safe methods are held once for the whole account, not per Area. Write one and every Location has it.
That is the right level: how you cool stock safely does not change because it is a different kitchen. It also means an edit reaches everywhere at once — useful when a procedure changes, and worth remembering before you tailor a method to one site's equipment. If two sites genuinely need different procedures, write two methods with distinct names rather than editing one back and forth.
What to Write One For
Cover the things that would make someone ill if they went wrong:
- Cooking and reheating
- Chilling and cooling
- Cross-contamination and separation
- Cleaning and disinfection
- Personal hygiene and hand washing
- Stock rotation and date labelling
- Defrosting
- Serving and holding
You do not need one for everything. You need one for anything a reasonable inspector would ask "how do you control that?" about.
Writing One
Add a Safe Method and give it a name, a category, and a description of the procedure. You can also record the equipment and chemicals it uses.
Write it as instructions to a person, not as a policy statement.
- Weak: "Appropriate temperature control is maintained at all times."
- Strong: "Cook chicken until the thickest part reads 75°C on a clean probe. Record the reading. If it is below 75°C, return it to the oven for five more minutes and probe again."
The second one can be followed by someone on their second shift. The first cannot be followed by anyone.
Include what to do when it goes wrong. A method that only describes the good outcome is half a method, and the failure path is the half an inspector is actually interested in.
Chemicals
The form asks whether the method uses chemicals. If it does, name them.
This is what ties your Safe Methods to your COSHH register: the cleaning method says which chemical to use, and COSHH says how to use it safely. Kept together, they answer both the food safety and the health and safety versions of the same question.
Review Frequency
Each method carries a review frequency — six months, a year, or a custom period.
Reviewing does not mean rewriting. It means reading it and asking whether it still describes what the kitchen actually does. Methods drift out of date quietly: equipment is replaced, a supplier changes, a dish is reworked, and the written method slowly stops matching reality.
A method that no longer matches what you do is worse than none, because it documents you failing to follow your own procedure.
Active and Archived
Methods are Active or Archived.
Archive superseded methods rather than deleting them. If a question is ever raised about something that happened last year, the method that was in force at the time is what matters — not the one you use now.
Starting Points
You can start from scratch or from an existing template and edit it.
Templates are a starting point, never an answer. A method copied unchanged describes a generic kitchen, and yours is not generic. Change the equipment names, the temperatures you actually use, and the person responsible — an inspector who reads a method mentioning equipment you do not own will start wondering what else is decorative.