HACCP Flow Diagram Example: Cafe or Coffee Shop

Step 1 (Receive ingredients): Bread, fillings, salad items, and condiments arrive from suppliers. Check temperatures of chilled items (below 8C), check use-by dates, and inspect packaging. Step 2 (Store): Chilled fillings go to the fridge (0-5C). Bread and ambient items go to dry storage. Keep ready-to-eat fillings separated from any raw items (if your cafe handles raw meat at all, which many do not). Step 3 (Prepare): Staff wash hands, put on gloves, and assemble sandwiches on clean, sanitised surfaces. Salad items are washed under running water. Allergen-containing fillings (e.g. cheese, tuna with mayo containing egg) are handled with awareness of cross-contact. Step 4 (Label): If sandwiches are pre-made for display, they need a label with the use-by date, ingredients list, and allergen declarations under Natasha's Law (the UK Food Information Amendment 2019, requiring full ingredient labelling on pre-packed for direct sale foods). Step 5 (Display): Sandwiches are placed in a chilled display unit. The display unit must maintain food below 8C. For ambient display (e.g. at a market stall), food must be sold within 4 hours and then discarded. Step 6 (Serve): Handed to the customer. For the cold sandwich flow, the primary hazards are allergen cross-contact during assembly and temperature abuse during display. The chilled display is a monitoring point rather than a CCP for most cafes, as the food is consumed quickly.

The FSA explicitly states that food safety management procedures should be proportionate to the nature and size of the business. For a small cafe, your flow diagrams do not need to be engineering-grade process maps. A clear, hand-drawn diagram on A4 paper is perfectly acceptable if it accurately shows every step, marks the CCPs, and is kept up to date. What matters is that you have thought through the process and can explain it. If an EHO asks "what happens to your chicken mayo filling between delivery and going into a sandwich?", you should be able to point to the diagram and walk them through receiving at below 8C, storage in the dedicated filling fridge, and assembly within a defined time window. For cafes that use the SFBB pack, your safe methods effectively serve as a simplified version of flow diagrams. However, if your cafe has processes the SFBB pack does not cover (e.g. baking on-site, making your own chutneys, or preparing meals for delivery), you should supplement SFBB with specific flow diagrams for those processes.