What an EHO checks in a pub, and how the rating is scored.

How the visit works

EHOs from your local authority inspect food businesses on a frequency set by risk: a busy pub kitchen might see them every 18 months to two years, sooner after a poor rating, a complaint or a change of operator. They do not book ahead. They will identify themselves, they are entitled to access and to see your records, and they will usually walk the kitchen first and read the paperwork second. Most visits end with a conversation about what they found; enforcement beyond advice is reserved for genuine risk.

The three things the rating scores

The Food Hygiene Rating Scheme score, the 0 to 5 on the sticker, is built from three assessed areas:

• Food hygiene practice: how food is actually handled on the day. Temperatures of fridges and hot holding, cooking and cooling, cross-contamination controls, personal hygiene, allergen handling.
• Structure and cleanliness: the fabric of the premises. Cleanliness of surfaces and equipment, condition of walls and floors, pest control, ventilation, hand-wash basins working and stocked.
• Confidence in management: whether the officer believes standards will hold when they leave. This is where your documented food safety management system, usually SFBB in a pub, your diary, your review pages and your training records are assessed.

The third area is the one operators underestimate, and it caps the score: a spotless kitchen with no working records cannot get a 5, because the officer has no evidence the day of the visit is a normal day. The reverse is also true, which is why fabricated paperwork is so damaging: it destroys confidence in management even when the food handling is sound.

What they look at in practice

• Fridge, freezer and hot-hold temperatures, checked with their own probe against your recorded ones.
• The SFBB pack or equivalent: safe methods filled in, diary signed daily, the 4-weekly review completed.
• Separation of raw and ready-to-eat food, in storage and in preparation.
• Allergen information: whether the matrix matches the current menu and whether staff can answer an allergen question correctly.
• Cleaning schedules, and whether the scheduled cleaning has visibly happened.
• Pest evidence: droppings, gnaw marks, proofing gaps, and your pest control records.
• Probe calibration, date labelling, defrosting practice, and staff sickness rules.
• Training records for anyone handling food.

Being ready without a panic clean

The panic clean does not work, because the inspection is mostly of habits: date labels, diary signatures and temperature histories cannot be retrofitted in an afternoon. What does work is closing the gap between how the kitchen runs on a Friday night and how it runs when someone is watching, so there is no gap to be caught in.

• Do your own walk-through monthly with the officer’s eyes: temperatures, labels, hand-wash stations, the underside of things.
• Keep the diary honest and current, and complete the 4-weekly review when it is due.
• Fix the fabric issues you have been living with: the cracked tile, the fridge seal, the missing thermometer.
• Make sure the allergen matrix moved when the menu did.
• Brief the team that inspections are unannounced and that fetching the manager, not blocking the door, is the response.

If the visit goes badly, you have the right to reply and to request a re-score visit under the scheme rules, but the better route is the boring one: a kitchen whose records are real does not need to remember what story it told.

This guide is general information for UK pub and restaurant operators, not legal advice. Requirements can differ by premises and local authority: your fire risk assessment, your food safety management system and your local EHO are the authorities on your own site.