How you can get a 5 star food rating in 2022 (it’s not just good hygiene)

As some of you know, around 18 years ago I opened up a bakery/cafe called The Carrot Cake (no ginger jokes, please). I had a very good understanding of running a food business, not only from working the front of house and baking/cooking, but making sure all the food safety standards were met. That meant carrying out fridge and freezer checks, deep cleaning, ensuring against cross contamination, general hygiene and staff training. We had an amazing relationship with our environmental health officer (EHO) and always seemed to pass with very little minors – if any.

Following the success of The Carrot Cake, I ventured into a different industry, but two years ago, I was forced to take a U-turn due to Covid and fell back into the food industry. Now, having been away for 18 years, I realised a few things had changed. One noticeable change was the rating on the door, food truck or just about anything to do with food – 1 being ‘poor’ and 5 being ‘perfect’. On our first home visit two years ago, around three months after setting up Bagel or Beigel, we aced our EHO visit and scored a 5. Perfection all round – we were very happy.

Two years on and, as we now have a unit, we had our first visit to our new premises, but technically our second overall since we started.

The EHO was excited to see such clean premises from top to bottom, and had not one negative thing to say. I was beaming from cheek to cheek, until we were asked to look through my paperwork – the very same paperwork that gave us our 5-star rating – to my surprise, I was told that most of it was missing.

Things had changed more than I realised. It was never the case that I had to fill in a mound of paperwork before, and I don’t remember being given a heads up. I was allowed a second chance to redeem myself, but was told we could be penalised with a rating as low as 2 stars.

We take great pride in our hygiene rating and go above and beyond the standards, so this had nothing to do with how we handled our food or how clean our premises were, but all to do with the paper trail. You could say that I should have known this, but as I mentioned before, things were a little different 18 years ago.

I felt so low and deflated… all my hard work, hours I sacrificed, gone in a flash.

The whole process really opened my eyes. All this time I would have thought a low rating could only have been given due to food contamination and poor hygiene practices – but in my case, it was completely the opposite. Who could’ve thought that paperwork was equal to, or even more important than, hygiene?

Not to worry though. We aced our second visit and we’re proud to say that our hygiene practices (and our paperwork skills) have been recognised!