The hygiene rating that keeps you on the apps, and the records behind it

Deliveroo and Uber Eats require partner kitchens to hold, or be waiting for, a Food Hygiene Rating of 2 or above, and say they remove kitchens that fall below it unless they can show improvements. Just Eat asks new partners for a 3 (or a Pass in Scotland, or awaiting inspection) and displays the rating on the listing. The policies change, so check the current terms, but the direction is the same on all three: the rating decides whether you trade. A kitchen that drops to a 1 has weeks, not months, to fix it.

Once you have dealt with the issues in the officer’s report, you can ask your local authority for a re-rating visit rather than waiting for the next routine inspection. Most councils in England charge a fee for it; in Wales and Northern Ireland the process is set out in the scheme. The visit is unannounced within a window, and the officer scores the kitchen from scratch, so the records have to show the fixes have been running for weeks, not since yesterday. You can also use the right to reply on the FSA website to explain what you have done in the meantime. Our guide to improving your food hygiene rating goes through the scoring in detail.

Food sold at a distance, through an app, a website or over the phone, has two allergen moments and both are legal requirements: the information must be available before the customer completes the order, and again when the food is handed over, which in practice means a label, a slip in the bag or clear information on the packaging. A blanket “may contain” on the app is not enough; it has to say which of the 14 allergens each dish contains. Food packed on the premises before it is ordered, a pre-made dessert in the fridge, is prepacked for direct sale and needs a full ingredients label as well.

Hot food should be kept at 63°C or above until it leaves, and delivered hot. It may fall below 63°C for a single period of up to two hours, after which it must be reheated to 75°C once or thrown away, and orders that a courier never collects should not be resold. Cold food should stay at 8°C or below. Officers ask what the longest wait at peak is and where orders sit while they wait; a hot-hold with a temperature check and a written time-out rule is the answer they want to see.

Each operator is a food business in its own right, registered with the council and rated on its own unit, even inside a hub run by a platform or a landlord. The shared parts, the corridors, the waste area, the pest contract, the extraction, are usually the hub’s responsibility under the lease, but the officer inspecting your unit will still ask how you check them and what you do when they fail, so get the split in writing and keep your side of it recorded. If you cook several virtual brands from one kitchen, they share one rating and one set of records.

Orbit is the AI assistant built into Hubl. It answers from your own records, product information and safe methods rather than from the open internet, so it knows which dishes contain peanuts, what the corrective action is for rice that has been out too long, and which checks were missed this week. For a takeaway that means the new starter or the driver-turned-cook gets the right answer in the middle of the Friday rush without stopping the pass, with the reason behind it, and the owner is not the only person who knows how the kitchen is supposed to run. Meet Orbit.