Safer Food Better Business: Mobile Caterers

Safer Food, Better Business (SFBB) is the Food Standards Agency's food safety management pack for small catering businesses. It is a government publication you download from GOV.UK — you do not buy it, and you do not need a consultant to write one for you.

You do need something. Retained Regulation (EC) No 852/2004 requires every food business operator to run a documented, HACCP-based food safety system, and a food truck is a food business operator like any other. SFBB is simply the FSA's ready-made way of satisfying that duty without writing a HACCP plan from scratch.

The gap this article fills: the caterers pack is written for a kitchen. Its safe methods assume a sink you can plumb, a fridge on mains power and a room you can close. Making it work from a unit with no fixed premises takes adaptation, and nobody publishes that adaptation.

First, Two Things Worth Knowing Before You Spend Money

The pack is free. Search the term and the results include people selling it — printed, spiral-bound, in a folder, sometimes for £30 or more. There is nothing wrong with paying for a printed copy if you want one, but be clear about what you are buying: convenience and paper, not the pack itself. The FSA describes it plainly as a "Food safety management pack for restaurants, cafés, takeaways and other small catering businesses", and publishes it for download.

SFBB is not compulsory. The law requires a food safety management system; it does not require this system. You may use any HACCP-based approach. SFBB is recommended because environmental health officers know it, it is proportionate to a small business, and it is already structured the way an inspection is structured. If you have a system of your own that meets the requirement, that is fine too.

What the Law Actually Requires

Article 5(1) of Regulation (EC) No 852/2004 is short:

"Food business operators shall put in place, implement and maintain a permanent procedure or procedures based on the HACCP principles."

Article 5(2) then sets out the seven principles, and the last one is the reason paperwork exists at all:

"establishing documents and records commensurate with the nature and size of the food business to demonstrate the effective application of the measures outlined in subparagraphs (a) to (f)"

Read that carefully, because it is the most useful sentence in the whole regulation for a small mobile operator, and it does two things at once. The records must be commensurate with the nature and size of the business — a two-person burger van is not expected to keep the records a hotel kitchen keeps, so proportionate is the standard rather than exhaustive. But the closing words also set what the records are for: they exist to demonstrate the effective application of the controls you identified in the earlier principles. Paperwork that does not evidence a control you actually run is not doing the job, however neat it looks.

GOV.UK puts the same duty in one line: you must "have a system for managing food safety".

What Is in the Caterers Pack

Two halves, and they do different jobs.

Safe method sheets. Each one covers a single hazard area — cross-contamination, cleaning, chilling, cooking, personal hygiene, food allergies, and management topics. Each sheet states what to do, why it matters, and what to do if something goes wrong. You read them once, tick the ones that apply to your operation, and write in anything you do differently.

The diary. This is the part that is ongoing. You sign it daily to confirm the safe methods were followed, and you write down anything that went wrong or differently — a delivery rejected, a fridge running warm, equipment failure, a member of staff off sick.

The safe methods are the system. The diary is the evidence that the system runs. An inspection looks at both, and it is almost always the diary that is missing rather than the methods.

Adapting Each Safe Method to a Mobile Unit

This is where the pack needs work. Below, the areas that genuinely differ on a mobile unit and what to write in the "what we do differently" space.

Cleaning without mains water

The pack assumes plumbed hot water. A van has a tank, and the tank is finite.

Record your water capacity and how you top up mid-service. Running out of hot water part-way through a trading day is a food safety failure, not an inconvenience.
Separate hand-washing from equipment-washing explicitly. A single sink used for both is the most common structural finding on mobile units.
Note where waste water goes and how it is disposed of. Councils differ, and "onto the ground" is never the answer.
Where you cannot wash something on the unit, say so and record the alternative — swap-out clean equipment carried from base, sanitiser wipes for surfaces between tasks.

Chilling on the move and on a generator

Chilled storage on a mobile unit fails differently from a kitchen fridge. It gets warm in transit, and it depends on a generator that can stop.

Record fridge temperature at the start and end of each trading session, not just once a day.
Write down what you do if the generator cuts out — how long you allow before food is discarded, and who decides.
Cover the journey from base to pitch. Cool boxes and their contents are part of the system, and the pack has no sheet for them.
Keep a probe thermometer and record checks; on a unit with no fixed thermometer display it is your only evidence.

Cooking in a small space

The cooking safe methods largely transfer intact. The one addition worth writing in is a probe-checking routine for the first item of each batch during a busy service, and what you do when the queue is long — because that is when corners get cut and an inspector knows it.

Cross-contamination in one metre of counter

A kitchen separates raw and ready-to-eat by space. A van cannot, so it must separate by time and by equipment.

Record your sequence — what gets prepped first, what surfaces get sanitised between stages.
Colour-coded boards and separate tongs are worth writing down because they demonstrate the control.
Note where raw meat is stored relative to ready-to-eat food in the same small fridge. The answer needs to be "below, sealed", and having written it down is the point.

Allergens at a hatch

You are handing food to a stranger through a window, in the noise, with a queue behind them. There is no table service and no time.

Record how allergen information is made available — a written matrix on display, on a menu board, or on request.
Record who is trained to answer allergen questions and what they say when unsure. "I don't know, so I can't sell you that" is a correct answer and should be an authorised one.
If you change a supplier or a recipe mid-season, that is a diary entry.

Opening and closing checks on a pitch

The pack has opening and closing checks. On a mobile unit they need extending to cover setup and pack-down: gas connection checked, generator running, water tank full, waste tank empty, fridge at temperature before stock goes in, hand-wash station stocked.

Write these as a single list you actually run through on the pitch. It takes two minutes and it is the most useful page in the whole pack.

Running the Diary When You Do Not Trade Every Day

The diary assumes daily opening. Most mobile units do not trade every day, and this trips people up.

The answer is straightforward: record the days you trade. A gap on a non-trading day is not a failure, but an unexplained gap looks identical to a missed entry. Write "no trading" on non-trading days, or note your trading pattern at the front of the diary so the gaps are self-explanatory. Either satisfies an inspector; neither takes any time.

The same applies to seasonal operators. If you close for the winter, record the shutdown and record the recommissioning checks when you start again — the deep clean, the water system flush, the fridge temperature check before stock goes back in.

Where SFBB Fits With Everything Else

Your food safety system sits alongside, not instead of, the rest of the compliance stack:

Food business registration — free, at least 28 days before you start trading, with the council for the place the unit is kept overnight. Our guide to registering a food business covers the form.
Street trading licence or consent — one per council, and entirely separate. See the council-by-council cost breakdown.
Food hygiene training — Annex II, Chapter XII of the same Regulation requires operators to ensure "that food handlers are supervised and instructed and/or trained in food hygiene matters commensurate with their work activity". It names no qualification; a Level 2 certificate is the usual evidence. Personal to the individual, not to the location.
Gas and electrical safety — covered in our LPG gas safety certificate guide.

Your food safety records are the part an environmental health officer will spend the most time on, and the only part you cannot produce on the day if you have not been keeping it.

The Practical Version

Download the caterers pack from GOV.UK. Do not buy it unless you specifically want it printed
Work through the safe methods once and annotate every mobile-specific difference
Extend the opening and closing checks to cover setup and pack-down on a pitch
Record fridge temperatures at the start and end of every trading session
Write down what happens when the generator or the water runs out — before it does
Keep the diary daily on trading days, and mark non-trading days rather than leaving gaps
Keep it in the unit, not at home. It is no use in an inspection if it is on the kitchen table

Run our free compliance checker to see which registrations, certificates and licences your setup still needs, or build a personalised list with the startup checklist generator. StreetComply is building a dashboard to keep every licence, certificate and renewal date across every council in one place — join the waitlist.

Safer Food, Better Business is published by the Food Standards Agency, and its GOV.UK publication page states that it "applies to England, Northern Ireland and Wales". Scotland has separate arrangements, with food safety there overseen by Food Standards Scotland. The adaptations suggested here are practical guidance for applying the caterers pack to a mobile unit — your local environmental health team is the authority on what is adequate for your specific operation, and it is worth asking them before an inspection rather than after. This is general information, not legal advice.