Do I Need Digital Food Safety Records?

Paperwork falling out of every pocket

Midway through my career I moved into a large-scale BRC-audited bakery. This is about as serious as food safety documentation gets — traceability down to the gram, tracking a delivery of salt from the pallet it arrived on through to the product it ended up in. Who put what in which oven, at what time.

I couldn't believe it ran on paper.

Despite the precision the system demanded — despite everything being tracked to a level that sounds almost excessive — the paperwork itself was falling out of every pocket, covering every table. A process that exact, held together by something that fragile. It felt less like a safeguard and more like a system set up to fail, and to mislead anyone who looked at it and assumed the paper meant the process was under control.

The same broken system, just smaller

I'd started my career in smaller bakeries, and later I moved back into a smaller, family-run multi-site business — far less paperwork, much lower complexity. I expected that to feel different.

It didn't. Less paper, same broken system. The problem was never the volume of documentation. It was paper itself, as a way of proving something was actually done, by actual people, at the actual time it needed to happen.

That's the point I stopped being willing to just live inside the problem. I decided to build the solution instead of remaining part of it.

What actually happens in front of an EHO

Here's the part that surprises people: I've seen paper systems break down in front of an EHO far more often than digital ones.

A lot of that comes down to how paper — specifically the SFBB pack — gets treated. Not as a tool, but as gospel. SFBB is a guideline the government put together to help small business owners get everything they need off the shelf. Nothing more. It was never meant to be the one certain, unquestionable way of doing things. But that's often exactly how it gets treated — completed because it's the form, not because anyone's thinking about what it's actually supposed to prove.

That's where paper quietly fails. Not because the format is paper, but because filling in a box becomes the goal instead of the check itself.

Would a digital system get picked apart under the same scrutiny? Almost certainly, if it deserved to be. But my experience — including ongoing conversations with local councils and their health departments — tells me they're not resistant to digital records. Quite the opposite. Every conversation I've had suggests councils understand the current system needs to improve, and are open to that happening.

So — are digital records actually accepted?

Yes. UK food businesses can keep digital food safety records, provided they're accurate, accessible, and can be produced when an EHO asks for them. There's no rule requiring paper, and no rule that makes paper inherently more credible. SFBB itself is guidance, not law — a starting framework, not a mandate for a specific format.

The real question was never paper versus digital. It's whether your system proves the checks actually happened — reliably, consistently, and in a way you can produce on demand. Paper can do that. In my experience, it does it less often than people assume, and less often than digital.

If you're on the first step

You don't need to overhaul everything on day one. Start with the checks that matter most — temperature logs, opening and closing procedures — and get comfortable with the shift from "I filled in a form" to "I can prove this happened, every time, without digging through a folder."

That's what Culinary Key was built around — not replacing paper for the sake of it, but making sure a missed check never sits quietly unnoticed until an inspector finds it first.

That's the actual point of going digital. Not the format. What the format can prove.