HACCP gets mentioned in a way that makes it sound intimidating: like something only a large manufacturer needs a food scientist to design. For most independent restaurants, that’s not quite the reality.
What HACCP actually is
HACCP stands for Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points. At its core, it’s a way of thinking about food safety: identify where things could actually go wrong (hazards), figure out which points in your process matter most for controlling them (critical control points), and put a check in place at each one. That’s the whole concept; the complexity people associate with it usually comes from how it’s documented, not the idea itself.
How SFBB and HACCP relate
SFBB isn’t a different system from HACCP: it’s HACCP principles, pre-applied to a typical small catering business, in plain English, by the FSA. The critical control points for most independent kitchens are genuinely the same ones SFBB already covers: cooking temperature, chilling, cross-contamination, and cleaning. If you’re following SFBB properly, you are, in substance, applying HACCP, just without needing to build the framework from scratch yourself.
When you need something more than SFBB
Most single-site restaurants, cafes, and takeaways doing standard cooking and reheating are well served by SFBB alone. A fuller, bespoke HACCP plan tends to become necessary when:
- You’re doing something genuinely non-standard: vacuum packing, curing, fermenting, or other specialist processes not covered by the standard SFBB safe methods
- You’re operating at a larger or more complex scale: multiple sites, central production kitchens, high-risk ready-to-eat food produced in volume
- A specific hazard in your process isn’t adequately addressed by any of SFBB’s standard safe methods
If none of that applies to you, building a parallel bespoke HACCP plan on top of SFBB is usually unnecessary duplication, not extra safety.
The mistake in both directions
Some owners assume HACCP is irrelevant to a small kitchen and treat SFBB as a box-ticking formality disconnected from “real” food safety, which misses that SFBB is the risk-based thinking, just packaged for them. Others assume they need a formal, consultant-written HACCP document to be compliant, and pay for complexity they don’t actually need. The right answer for most independent kitchens sits between those two: take SFBB seriously as the risk-based system it is, and only reach for something more bespoke if your operation genuinely doesn’t fit its standard safe methods.
What actually matters day to day
Regardless of which label you put on it, an EHO is checking the same underlying thing: have you identified where food safety could fail in your specific kitchen, and can you show a consistent process that controls it? The critical control points that matter most in practice are almost always the same ones covered by good temperature logging: the framework matters less than the evidence.
Keeping the thinking, losing the overhead
Rated5 is built directly on the SFBB structure, which means the HACCP thinking is already built in, without asking you to manage a separate, more complex system on top. See how Rated5 maps to your existing process.