Allergy-safe, inspection-ready records for school and nursery kitchens

Yes. Any kitchen preparing food for pupils or children is a food business and is inspected and rated under the Food Hygiene Rating Scheme, whether the catering is run by the school, the council or a contractor. The rating attaches to the premises and is published on the FSA website, so a contractor’s lapse is the school’s rating. In Wales and Northern Ireland it must be displayed. It is worth checking who in your arrangement is registered as the food business operator, because that is who the officer will write to.

The 2025 EYFS framework added a set of safer eating requirements: gather each child’s dietary requirements, preferences, allergies and intolerances before they start; make that information available to all staff; give each child a nominated member of staff responsible for checking that food and drink offered is safe for them; produce allergy action plans with parents and, where needed, health professionals; and have a paediatric first aider present whenever children eat. In group settings everyone who prepares or handles food must be trained in food hygiene, and Ofsted must be told within 14 days if two or more children on the premises get food poisoning. Hubl holds the dietary record against the child’s meals and keeps the training and shutdown records the inspector asks for.

If food is packed on the premises before it is chosen, a wrapped sandwich in the grab-and-go chiller, a boxed salad, a pot of fruit, it is prepacked for direct sale and needs a full ingredients label with the 14 allergens emphasised. Food served to order or unwrapped does not need the label, but the allergen information still has to be available and accurate for every dish, in writing or verbally with a sign telling pupils and parents to ask. The label or the answer is only as good as the allergen record behind it, which is what the matrix is for.

One live record per child of allergies, intolerances and dietary needs, owned by the kitchen as well as the office, updated the day a diagnosis changes, and visible at the point of serving rather than pinned up in the back. Then a way to check every plate against it, which the EYFS now formalises as a nominated person for each child. Cross-contact matters as much as ingredients: shared utensils, the same fryer, a birthday cake from home. The failure we see most is a kitchen working from an allergy list that was right at the start of term.

Decide what happens to stock and equipment before you leave: use up or dispose of perishables, clean and either keep fridges and freezers running with the readings checked, or empty, clean and switch them off. Deep clean, run a pest check, and record all of it. On return, flush water systems, run fridges and freezers to temperature before restocking, check dates on everything that stayed, recalibrate the probe, and record the restart checks. Officers ask about the holiday because it is where six weeks of records usually go missing; a shutdown and restart checklist closes the gap.

Orbit is the AI assistant built into Hubl. It answers from your own records, dietary information and safe methods rather than from the open internet, so it knows which children in a class cannot have egg, what the corrective action is when the hot hold reads 58°C, and what the restart checks are after a holiday. For a school or nursery that means the cover cook or the lunchtime supervisor gets the right answer without hunting for the cook or the manager, with the reason behind it, and every kitchen in a trust or group gets the same answer. Meet Orbit.