Guides · Running the place
What the EHO inspector actually checks
The records and habits that get you a 5 on the door, from someone who had the visits.
The Environmental Health Officer (EHO) visit is the one every new owner dreads. Here's how it worked at my bar for fifteen years, what they looked at every single time, and the one question I got wrong.
What they look at, in the order they look
- Fridge and freezer temperatures, and your written log of them. Not "is the fridge cold" but "can you show me it was cold every day this month". A thermometer in each fridge and a daily log is the cheapest insurance you'll ever buy.
- Dates and labels. Everything open or decanted has a label with the date it was opened and the use-by date. Anything out of date in a fridge is the fastest way to lose a star.
- Pest control. Evidence of a contract or regular checks, bait stations, no gaps under doors, bins closed and the bin area clean.
- Toilets. Clean, stocked with soap and paper, hot water working. They do check.
- Stock rooms. Food off the floor, raw and cooked separated, nothing stored under a leaking pipe, chemicals away from food.
- Your food safety records: the diary, the cleaning schedule, the cooking and cooling records, all filled in and up to date, not filled in the night before in one colour of pen.
- Questions to you and your staff about how things are cooked and to what temperature, how you cool things down, how you deal with allergens. They're checking that the system in the folder is the system in the kitchen.
The one I got wrong
I had a 5 on the door for years. On one visit the inspector asked me: "A customer can have a steak rare, medium or well done. Can they have a burger the same way?" I said yes, and that customers sometimes asked for it. Wrong.
In the UK, burgers must be cooked all the way through unless the business has a validated safe-cooking method that its local authority has accepted. A steak is one piece of muscle, so the bacteria are on the outside and searing deals with them. Minced meat has the outside mixed all the way through. Most small kitchens have no business serving a pink burger, and the inspector will ask.
The habits that made inspections easy
- Do the records every day, properly. Five minutes at opening and closing. The inspector can tell a real log from a fake one in seconds.
- Walk your own kitchen as if you were the inspector once a week: open every fridge, read every label, look under every shelf.
- Train the staff to answer. Inspectors ask the chef and the kitchen porter, not just you. If your staff can explain the cooling rule and the allergen chart, you're fine.
- Be friendly, not clever. Over the years the local inspectors got to know me well. That didn't get me a pass; it meant I got straight answers to my questions, which is better than a pass.
All the records above are in our Café & Bar Records Pack, which is the paperwork I ran my own kitchen on. The official guidance is the Food Standards Agency's Safer Food, Better Business pack, which is free.