The SFBB 4-weekly review, done properly.
Safer Food Better Business stands or falls on the review. The daily diary proves you did the checks; the 4-weekly review proves somebody in charge actually looked. It is the page EHOs turn to first, and the one most pubs leave blank.
What the review is for
Safer Food Better Business is the Food Standards Agency's food safety management pack for small catering businesses, and in England and Wales it is the most common way a pub meets its legal duty to have a documented food safety management system based on HACCP principles. The pack has three working parts: the safe methods you set up once and revisit when something changes, the daily diary you sign every trading day, and the 4-weekly review.
The review exists because daily records rot quietly. A fridge that has drifted warm for three weeks, a closing check that stopped being done on Sundays, a new starter who was never shown the cooling rules: none of these show up on any single day's page. The review is the step where someone responsible reads the last four weeks as a whole and asks whether the system still matches the kitchen.
What it actually asks
The FSA's review page is a short set of questions, and they are better designed than they look. In substance they ask:
- Have the daily diary pages been completed every day you traded, and signed?
- Were any problems recorded, and what was done about them at the time?
- Have any of your suppliers, your menu, your equipment or your staff changed?
- Do any of the safe methods need updating because of those changes?
- Has any equipment failed or been repaired in the period?
- Have any staff joined or changed roles, and have they been trained on the safe methods that apply to them?
The honest answers are the valuable ones. A review that says "new fryer installed, cooking safe method updated, two new starters trained on cross-contamination" is worth more to you and to an inspector than four weeks of ticks, because it shows the system responding to reality.
Who should complete it
Someone with authority over the kitchen: the licensee, the general manager or the head chef. The point of the review is that it can change things, so it should be done by a person who can order a probe replacement, rewrite a safe method or book training. Delegating it to whoever is quietest on a Tuesday defeats it. It should also be the same role consistently, so drift between reviews is visible to the person reading them.
The mistakes inspectors see most
- The review is missing entirely, with the diary otherwise complete. This is the most common finding, and it reads as "nobody in charge looks at this".
- Reviews filled in retrospectively in one sitting, in the same pen, the week of the inspection. Officers have seen thousands of diaries and recognise this instantly.
- Problems in the diary that never reach the review. A fridge failure recorded on the Tuesday page with no corrective action and no mention four pages later is worse than either omission alone.
- Safe methods that no longer match the kitchen: a menu that gained a smoked item, a sous vide bath that appears in no method, allergens handled by memory.
- New starters with no training record. The review asks about staff changes precisely because this is where systems fail.
Making it a habit that survives a busy month
The pubs that keep the review honest treat it as a diary appointment, not a task: same day every four weeks, twenty minutes, protected the way a stocktake is. Reading the four weeks of pages first and writing what was actually found beats writing "all fine" from memory in every case that matters. If the same problem appears in two consecutive reviews, that is the system telling you a safe method or a piece of equipment needs to change, not the paperwork.
Digital systems help mostly by refusing to lie: entries carry the time they were really made, failures cannot be closed without a corrective action, and the review is prompted when it is due rather than remembered when a white van parks outside. On paper, the discipline has to come from the person; either way, the review only works if it is read as well as written.
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.