What SFBB actually covers
Safer Food Better Business is the Food Standards Agency’s free food safety management pack, built for small catering and retail businesses that don’t have the resources to design a food safety system from first principles. It’s made up of two things: a set of “safe methods”, one-page guides covering a specific practice (like chilling food correctly, or cooking chicken safely), and a diary you complete to confirm those methods were actually followed each day.
The safe methods are organised into five categories, and almost every practical food safety risk a small kitchen faces falls into one of them:
- Cross-contamination: keeping raw and ready-to-eat food separate, safe use of equipment and surfaces, and allergen information.
- Cleaning: what needs cleaning, how, and how often.
- Chilling: keeping food cold enough, for the right length of time.
- Cooking: cooking and reheating food to a safe temperature.
- Management: the processes that hold everything else together, including staff training and what to do when something goes wrong.
Using the pack properly and keeping an honest diary is, in the FSA’s own words, what helps you comply with the law and get the most out of your food hygiene rating.
The diary, on paper or electronically
The diary is the record that shows an inspector your safe methods are genuinely followed, not just filed away. The FSA’s own SFBB guidance is explicit that this doesn’t have to be paper: you can “keep an electronic diary” by filling it in and storing it digitally instead of on printed sheets. What matters to an inspector is that the record is complete, consistent, and genuinely reflects what happened.
Equivalents across the UK
SFBB itself is the FSA’s resource, built primarily for England (and used the same way in Wales and Northern Ireland, alongside their own local guidance). Scotland runs its own equivalent, CookSafe, developed by Food Standards Scotland specifically for Scottish caterers, covering the same HACCP-based principles in its own pack. Northern Ireland also has Safe Catering, a parallel food safety management guide covering the same ground. Whichever pack applies to your nation, the underlying structure, safe methods plus a genuine diary, is broadly the same.
For how this connects to an actual inspection, see our guide to preparing for a food hygiene inspection, and for the specifics of keeping that diary digitally instead of on paper, see paper SFBB vs. a digital diary.