If your kitchen uses Safer Food, Better Business, you can use Lemon to keep many of your SFBB records organised.
You do not need to change your food safety system to start using the app. Lemon helps your team record checks, explain problems and find the records later. Your completed SFBB pack still describes how your kitchen keeps food safe.
How do SFBB records fit with HACCP?
SFBB is the Food Standards Agency's practical approach to food safety management for small food businesses. It applies HACCP principles in everyday kitchen language. So an app that supports HACCP records can also be useful to a restaurant using SFBB. See the FSA guidance on SFBB.
This article focuses on SFBB. Other UK packs include CookSafe in Scotland and Safe Catering in Northern Ireland; use the guidance appropriate to your business. Our four-question pack chooser covers the difference.
Which daily checks can you record in Lemon?
Start with the checks your kitchen already carries out.
- Opening and closing: enable Lemon's daily checklists and edit them to match your kitchen. Staff answer Yes, No or N/A and add notes where needed.
- Cleaning and extra checks: use the deep-clean, pest-control and probe-calibration templates, or create your own checklist.
- Temperatures: record fridge and freezer readings, plus food checks for cooking, cooling, reheating and hot holding.
- Deliveries: record the supplier, products, condition, date checks and a temperature reading where appropriate.
- Allergens: enable the optional allergen matrix to keep a dish-by-dish record of the 14 regulated allergens and export it for your team.
Completed checklists record who finished them and when. You can find the setup steps in our guide to using checklists.
Choose the checklists your kitchen needs, then adapt the editable templates to your routine.
SFBB keeps routine paperwork brief and asks you to record problems or changes. Use temperature logs where they support your safe methods; SFBB does not call for probing every dish. The FSA explicitly preserves appropriate sensory checks and reporting by exception. See the FSA guidance on keeping SFBB simple.
How do you record something going wrong?
A useful record explains what happened and what you did about it.
For fridge-temperature issues, Lemon records the problem and corrective action. Managers can add follow-up notes and close the issue when it is resolved. That keeps the initial reading and the later action together.
For other checks, add a note to the checklist. A custom checklist with short-text questions can also record a general problem, a change in the kitchen and the action taken. See our guide to issues and corrective actions.
Can custom checklists cover the SFBB four-weekly review?
Yes. You can use a custom checklist to record your review answers and actions.
- Create a checklist called SFBB four-weekly review.
- Set its frequency to Anytime so you can start a fresh review whenever it is due.
- Use the current FSA four-weekly review as your reference. Include all its review points, with Yes/No questions and short-text fields for findings and action taken.
- Set a separate calendar reminder to repeat every 28 days. Lemon does not currently offer a four-weekly recurrence; Monthly is a different interval.
- Look back through the previous four weeks, complete every review item and save the checklist. Lemon records your name and completion time.
What should you keep alongside Lemon?
Keep your completed safe methods, cleaning instructions, staff training records and supplier contact details accessible. The FSA SFBB pack provides these records. Lemon's checklists record work done; they do not write your kitchen's procedures for you.
Continue your SFBB daily diary sign-off too. Completing individual checks in Lemon is not the same as the diary's daily confirmation that safe methods were followed and supervised.
When you need to review your records or show them at an inspection, Lemon lets you export temperature logs, food checks, deliveries and completed checklists as a PDF.
Export your Lemon records to keep alongside your completed SFBB pack.
How can you get started tomorrow?
Open your current SFBB pack and choose one routine to move into Lemon, such as opening checks. Match the checklist to your kitchen, show your team how to complete it and review their first entries together.
Then add the records that would be most useful to have in one place. Our Lemon setup guide walks you through setting up your kitchen.
