Food Hygiene: Sell What You Make

The moment you sell food with any regularity — a monthly market stall, a standing order of sourdough for neighbours, jam through a village shop — you are a food business in the eyes of UK law, even if the kitchen is the one you cooked tea in last night. That's not a reason to stop. Thousands of registered food businesses run from home kitchens. It just means three things now apply to you: registration, inspection, and the hygiene standards this course teaches.

What the law actually says

Food safety hazards come in four kinds: biological (bacteria and their toxins), chemical (cleaning products, excess additives), physical (glass, plasters, jewellery), and allergenic. The first and last cause nearly all the real harm, so they get nearly all of this step.

The bacteria worth knowing by name

The 14 allergens

UK law names fourteen allergens that must always be declared: celery, cereals containing gluten, crustaceans, eggs, fish, lupin, milk, molluscs, mustard, peanuts, sesame, soya, sulphur dioxide (in many dried fruits — and your chutneys), and tree nuts. For a market stall this means knowing every ingredient in everything you sell, including the ones inside bought-in ingredients — the mustard in the curry powder, the sulphites in the dried apricots.

Almost everything practical in food hygiene reduces to four Cs — chilling, cooking, cleaning, cross-contamination — and most of those reduce to temperature. Bacteria multiply between 5°C and 63°C, fastest at body temperature. In ideal conditions one bacterium becomes two every twenty minutes: millions by morning. The whole game is keeping food out of that zone, or moving it through quickly.

The numbers to know cold

Cleaning that counts, and hands

Cleaning is a two-stage job: wash with hot soapy water to remove grease and debris, then sanitise to kill what's left, respecting the contact time on the bottle. Cloths are the classic vector — either disposable, or boil-washed daily. Hands: before starting, after raw meat or eggs, after the bin, after your phone, after the loo, washed for twenty seconds with soap. And the rule that makes the rest credible — 48 hours clear of any vomiting or diarrhoea before you handle food anyone else will eat. No exceptions for market day.

Your food safety management system

The law requires every food business to have a written food safety management system based on HACCP principles. That sounds corporate; for a home producer it means: walk through what you make, name what could go wrong at each stage, say what you do about it, and write that down. For jam: mould from under-sterilised jars → jars into the oven at 140°C for 15 minutes, lids boiled. For chutney: spoilage from weak vinegar → measure it, never dilute. The Food Standards Agency publishes Safer Food, Better Business — a free pack that turns this into a fill-in diary an EHO will recognise on sight. Download it, fill it in, keep it in the kitchen.

The certificate itself

Here is the honest legal position: no law names a certificate. The requirement is training or supervision appropriate to the work. But the Level 2 Food Hygiene certificate (sometimes "Food Safety in Catering" or "for Manufacturing") is the universal way to evidence it — EHOs expect it, market organisers ask for it, and insurers like it. The exam is a short online multiple-choice test after one to three hours of study, costs £10–25 from dozens of providers, and if you've done this course properly you will find it comfortable. Choose a provider whose course is CPD-assured or, better, an Ofqual-regulated qualification (Highfield and RSPH are the recognisable awarding bodies). Certificates don't legally expire; renewing every three years is the convention.

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