Setting Up Your Checklists

Setting Up Your Checklists

Culinary Key generates daily checklists from lists you control. Get these right and the daily routine takes minutes.

Where They Live

Go to Site Management, open the site, and you will find a tab for each list:

• Opening — what gets checked before service
• Closing — what gets checked at the end
• Cleaning — daily cleaning tasks, plus scheduled deep cleans
• Temperature — the fridges, freezers and units you record

Each Area keeps its own lists. The kitchen's opening checks and the bar's opening checks are separate, which is the point — one shared list would force both teams to scroll past tasks that are not theirs.

Writing Good Tasks

A task should be specific enough that two different people would do the same thing.

• "Check fridges" is weak — which fridges, checked how?
• "Record temperature of walk-in chiller" is clear.

Aim for tasks someone can complete and honestly tick. If a task is vague, it gets ticked without being done, and a checklist nobody believes is worse than no checklist at all.

Keep the list as short as it can honestly be. Long checklists get rushed.

Temperature Units

The Temperature tab is where you name the units you record — walk-in chiller, dessert fridge, freezer 2, hot hold counter.

Name them the way your team actually refers to them. If everyone calls it "the big fridge", call it that. A list of formally-named units nobody recognises leads to readings logged against the wrong unit, which is worse than a slightly informal name.

Copying From Another Site

If you run more than one site, you do not need to type the same list twice. The Opening, Closing and Cleaning tabs each offer to import tasks from another site.

Import brings across one list at a time — importing opening tasks brings opening tasks only. Temperature units are deliberately not importable, because units are physical equipment and are almost never identical between sites.

Import, then edit. A second kitchen is rarely an exact copy of the first.

Changing Lists Later

Edit these lists whenever the operation changes — new equipment, a new dish, a change after an inspection.

Editing a list changes future checklists. It does not alter checklists already completed, and it must not: a completed record is evidence of what was checked on that day, and rewriting it retrospectively would destroy the thing that makes it worth keeping.

Review your lists after any EHO visit. If an inspector raises something, adding it to the relevant checklist is the most direct way to show it is now being managed routinely rather than remembered occasionally.