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Caterers Choice Food Safety was created by Mike Purcell, an environmental health professional with over two decades of hospitality management experience prior to gaining the same qualifications as your local authority EHO. His hospitality career sets the tone for the services provided, always ensuring they work for caterers as well as meeting UK legal requirements. That's why caterers choose us!
Mike spent most of his catering career working for the big hospitality chains with the resources to hire expensive food safety consultancies. He founded Caterers Choice Food Safety with the objective of making these services accessible to the smaller hospitality businesses that are the fabric of our communities.
Our flagship products are our complete food safety management systems. Our unique 3-file design ensures they are unrivalled for organisation, separating the HACCP assessment from the in-service kitchen checks and less frequent office checks. You can read more about the contents in our FSMS Guide.
We provide both bespoke FSMSs for hospitality businesses, and our pre-written series - Food Safety Management for Hospitality With FSMH, most businesses can have professionally written food safety policies for just £39.99. For businesses a little out of the ordinary, our bespoke packages start at just £150!
There is also the option for businesses to complement their existing management systems with our convenient check sheets. Browse our SHOP.
Let's address the elephant in the room - Safer Food Better Business. Why would businesses choose our Food Safety Management for Hospitality over the UK Food Standards Agency management system? There are many things we love about SFBB that we have replicated. We love the simplified HACCP method that is free from jargon; and the opportunity for businesses to confirm their own safe methods if they differ from those suggested.
However, we think there's plenty of room for improvement...
The SFBB method of only 'reporting by exception' is limited. We think it's important that staff record positive actions such as correct food cooking temperatures too. This allows supervisors to identify if staff are making errors that they are unaware of and retrain. Simply stating everything went as planned does not account for gaps in training. Recording positive actions also allows businesses to address near misses before they become an issue, and can be used as a due diligence legal defence if required.
Where SFBB seeks to reduce the burden on businesses by requiring less checks, FSMH has done this by improving the level of organisation. Our 3-file design and food hygiene diary formatting make food safety management easy and does not increase the burden on businesses.
SFBB allows business to apply sensory information such as colour changes and steaming food, instead of taking temperatures. We think that if a business is serious about providing safe food, using a probe thermometer for a sample of dishes, in addition to sensory checks, is not a big ask.
SFBB explicitly refrains from using any flow charts in their safe methods. However, we use simple decision trees to guide actions for hot and cold food storage, as they are easier to follow than paragraphs of instructions.
We think SFBB is too generic. For example, the same opening and closing checks cannot be applied to a mobile caterer setting up a temporary pitch to a restaurant open all day every day in the same place, or a B&B serving breakfast for two hours. That's why there are five versions of FSMH.
Businesses can personalise FSMH food hygiene diaries with their own branding. There's actually a practical reason for doing this, as it demonstrates to staff that these are your food safety procedures and you are fully behind them. Applying your branding can improve the food safety culture in your workplace!
Businesses will argue that SFBB is available to download for free, whilst FSMH costs £39.99. Yes, this is technically true, but nothing is absolutely free. When accounting for the cost of paper, ink and printing that SFBB users will still face, we think the small increase to upgrade to FSMH is great value.
Businesses may actually save by using FSMH. Our Pest Control checks remove the need to routinely use a pest control contractor. You only pay for pest control when a pest is spotted, which is made less likely if following our suggested safe methods.
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