Every kitchen in the group, one screen, tonight

Yes. Ratings are given per premises after each inspection, so a group of twelve has twelve ratings, each shown separately on the FSA website and the delivery apps. There is no group average and no way to carry a strong site’s rating to a weak one. In Wales and Northern Ireland each site must display its own sticker. The practical consequence is that the group’s reputation is set by its lowest-rated kitchen, which is why head office needs to see every kitchen’s records, not just the ones it visits.

Legally, the food business operator for each site, which in most franchise models is the franchisee: they register the premises, they are inspected, and they carry the rating. In practice the franchisor sets the system the franchisee is contractually bound to follow, and both are exposed when it fails, one in law and one in reputation. A shared platform where the brand builds the checks and every franchisee’s records are visible is how both sides evidence their part.

Primary Authority is a statutory scheme that lets a business trading across several council areas form a partnership with one local authority, which then provides assured advice on areas such as food hygiene that other councils must take into account when they inspect or consider enforcement. For a group it means consistent interpretation instead of twelve. The catch is that the advice is only worth having if every site follows the agreed procedures and can show it, which brings it back to records.

Hold it once, centrally, against products and dishes rather than against sites, and let the sites read from that record instead of maintaining their own copies. Every menu change, supplier swap and recipe tweak then updates every site at the same moment, and the history shows who changed what. The failure pattern in groups is not a missing matrix, it is eleven matrices at eleven different ages. Our allergen matrix guide covers what the record needs to contain.

Under the Food Safety Act a business charged with an offence can defend itself by showing it took all reasonable precautions and exercised all due diligence to avoid it. For a group that is only credible with records that show the system existed, was followed at that site on that day, and that failures were dealt with. Timestamped checks against named people, corrective actions recorded with the problem, and an audit trail head office can produce are what turn a policy into a defence.

Orbit is the AI assistant built into Hubl. It answers from the group’s own records, product data and safe methods rather than from the open internet, so every site asks one source: which dishes contain sesame since the supplier change, what the corrective action is for a failed walk-in, which sites missed checks this week. For a group it removes the phone call to head office and the twelve local interpretations of the same rule, and it gives the operations team a plain-English way to interrogate the group’s records without building a report. Meet Orbit.