A food trailer, a Post-it, and a score on the door
A food trailer. A Post-it timer. A score on the door. We're building the food safety records so the proof is always ready.
The job
A food trailer in England. Weddings, events, a different field most weekends. Food is cooked in one place, driven to another, and served outside for hours.
In England, nobody signs off your food safety plan in advance. An inspector turns up, looks at what you can prove, and gives you a score from 0 to 5. It goes on your door and online. The records are the proof.
What we found
- The buffet timer was a Post-it. UK rules let chilled food sit out of the fridge for up to 4 hours, and hot food for up to 2 hours, once. At a wedding that clock runs every service. It was tracked on a sticky note.
- Records lived in paper logs. Nothing was in one place, and nothing was easy to hand to an inspector.
- The food travels. A restaurant rarely thinks about transport. A trailer does it every event. What temperature did it leave at, and what did it arrive at?
- Every guest is different. Wedding dietary requirements have to be checked against the 14 allergens the UK lists, not the 13 used elsewhere.
What we're building
- Temperature checks that work offline. Fields have no signal. Checks save on the device and sync later.
- Real timers for the 4-hour and 2-hour rules, instead of the Post-it.
- Transport records as standard, not an optional extra.
- One home base, many venues. The business is registered in one place and works everywhere, so the records follow that.
- An allergen query log for each event.
- An evidence pack. One PDF, any date range, ready when the inspector asks.
Where the data lives
It's hosted in the UK, on a server set up for this business. The records belong to the business. They can export them any time, and if they ever leave, the records go with them.
Getting the numbers right
Our food safety system was first built for New Zealand rules. In NZ, fridges must be at 5 °C or below. In England the legal limit is 8 °C. If we left the NZ number in, every fridge reading between 5 and 8 °C would flag as a fail when it isn't one. A system that cries wolf gets ignored.
So before it goes live, a UK food safety practitioner checks every limit. The pilot shows us whether it works in a real trailer. The review shows whether the numbers are legally right. We need both.
What's next
The pilot goes live in month. After the first inspection, we'll update this entry with what actually changed.