Food Hygiene Requirements

Before starting to trade, you must register your food business with the local authority Environmental Health department. Registration is free, mandatory, and cannot be refused — it enables the local authority to identify and inspect food businesses in their area. Registration applies to all food businesses, including home bakers, market traders, and mobile catering units. If you move premises, open a new site, or significantly change your business activities, you must re-register or update your registration.

Some food businesses require approval rather than (or in addition to) registration. Approval is required for businesses handling animal products at scale — slaughterhouses, cutting plants, dairies, egg packing centres, and certain food manufacturers. Approved establishments are listed on the Food Standards Agency (FSA) website. Operating without registration or required approval is a criminal offence under the Food Safety and Hygiene (England) Regulations 2013 (and equivalent devolved legislation).

Food businesses must implement a food safety management system based on HACCP principles (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points). For most small food businesses, this means implementing and documenting the Safer Food, Better Business (SFBB) pack published by the FSA — a practical, plain-English resource tailored to different types of food business. Larger businesses typically implement a full written HACCP plan.

HACCP requires you to identify the food safety hazards in your business (biological, chemical, physical), determine the critical control points (CCPs) where controls are essential (cooking temperature, chilled storage temperature, allergen segregation), set critical limits for each CCP, monitor those CCPs, take corrective action when limits are breached, and keep records of all of this. You must also implement good hygiene practice (GHP) — staff handwashing, cleaning schedules, pest control, temperature control for deliveries — as the foundation on which HACCP sits.

Environmental Health Officers (EHOs) inspect food businesses without prior notice. At inspection they assess: hygiene procedures (HACCP, temperature control, cleaning); structural conditions (premises, equipment, facilities); and confidence in management (record-keeping, training, compliance history). Each aspect is scored and combined into a Food Hygiene Rating from 0 (urgent improvement required) to 5 (very good).

In Wales and Northern Ireland, displaying your rating certificate is mandatory. In England, display is currently voluntary — though the FSA is pressing for mandatory display. Ratings are published on the FSA website regardless. A low rating is visible to customers, affects consumer trust, and can be damaging commercially. If you receive a low rating you can request a re-inspection (a fee applies in England) once improvements have been made. You can also appeal a rating you believe is wrong within 21 days of receiving it.

The Food Safety Act 1990 and the Food Safety and Hygiene (England) Regulations 2013 (with equivalent devolved legislation) create criminal offences for food businesses that sell food which is injurious to health, not of the nature or substance demanded, or falsely labelled. Local authorities have powers to serve hygiene improvement notices, hygiene emergency prohibition notices (closing a business immediately if there is an imminent risk to health), and to prosecute. Penalties on conviction include unlimited fines and imprisonment of up to two years for individual offenders.

Allergen management is one of the most significant compliance risks for food businesses following a series of high-profile prosecutions. The Natasha Ednan-Laperouse inquest in 2018 exposed the inadequacy of PPDS labelling rules, leading to Natasha's Law (in force October 2021), which requires all food prepacked for direct sale to carry a full ingredients list with all 14 major allergens emphasised. Since then, enforcement of allergen rules has intensified markedly. The 14 allergens are: celery, cereals containing gluten, crustaceans, eggs, fish, lupin, milk, molluscs, mustard, peanuts, sesame, soybeans, sulphur dioxide/sulphites, and tree nuts.

Staff allergen training must be substantive, documented, and regularly refreshed — not a tick-box exercise. All staff who take orders or serve food must know the allergen information for all menu items and be able to direct customers to accurate information. Where a dish is modified or a recipe changes, allergen records must be updated before the item is sold. Verbal assurances that a dish is allergen-free when it is not — or failure to disclose an allergen in a dish when asked — can constitute a criminal offence and expose the business to civil liability. Following the convictions of restaurant owners after allergen-related deaths, courts have shown willingness to impose custodial sentences in the most serious cases.