Safer Food Better Business

To help businesses satisfy food safety laws, the Food Standards Agency (FSA) has developed a Safer Food Better Business (SFBB) pack. This is designed to make it easy to develop a food safety management system. This can be adapted to your own catering or retail operation's needs. SFBB identifies what you do already to ensure the safety of food. It also makes sure your checks are appropriate and being applied.

There are a number of SFBB packs available which are designed to meet the specific needs of different food businesses. There are packs for:

Catering businesses
Retail businesses and restaurants
Takeaways that serve different cuisines, such as Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan cuisines
Childminders

There is also a supplement for care homes that is designed to be used with the pack for caterers.

Using the Safer Food Better Business pack

The pack focuses on four key areas of food safety (known as the "Four Cs"):

Cross contamination
Cleaning
Chilling
Cooking

Each SFBB pack is split into five sections with a number of fact sheets called ‘Safe Methods’. Typical safe methods would include instructions on “Cooking Food Safely” and “Reheating” for example. The idea is that you follow the safe methods that apply to your business. There are not about 20 methods in total across the "four Cs"

look at the pack and decide which safe methods apply to your business - and then follow them. There are about twenty methods in total covering aspects of the "4 Cs". However, not all of them will apply to all businesses.

A simple diary is also provided for record keeping. This includes a four-weekly review to check that the document remains up-to-date and allows common problems to be identified and addressed.