What happens during an EHO inspection: the process, the scoring and what comes after

Most food businesses only learn how an EHO inspection works when the officer is already standing in the kitchen. This guide walks through the visit from the knock at the door to the letter that follows: what the officer does, what they score, and how the numbers turn into the food hygiene rating on your door. If you want to check your own kitchen first, our free EHO inspection checklist covers the 24 checks officers make.

Who inspects you, and when

Food hygiene inspections are carried out by Environmental Health Officers (sometimes called food safety officers) from your local authority. Every registered food business is given a risk rating after each visit, and that rating sets how often you are inspected: the highest-risk premises are visited at least every six months, the lowest-risk every two to three years, with most restaurants, cafés and pubs somewhere in between. A newly registered business is usually inspected within its first few weeks of trading.

Routine inspections are unannounced. Officers can arrive at any reasonable time, including during service, at weekends and in the evening, and they have a legal right of entry under the Food Safety Act 1990. You can ask them to wait a few minutes while you finish a delivery or a rush of orders. You cannot turn them away, and obstructing an officer is an offence in its own right.

How the visit runs

A typical inspection of a restaurant kitchen takes one to two hours, longer for larger or multi-kitchen sites. Most officers follow the same shape.

1. Arrival. The officer shows identification and asks for the person in charge. They will explain the purpose of the visit and may ask what has changed since the last inspection.
2. The walk-through. They follow the journey food takes through your premises: the delivery door, dry and chilled storage, preparation areas, cooking, cooling, hot holding and the pass, then cleaning and waste. Expect them to open fridges, probe food with their own thermometer, check date labels, look under equipment and behind it, run the hot tap at the handwash basin and look for evidence of pests.
3. Questions for the team. Officers ask the people on the section, not the manager. What would you do if a customer said they had a nut allergy? What happens if that fridge reads 9°C? Where is the cleaning schedule? A confident, correct answer from a junior member of staff tells the officer more than any folder can.
4. The paperwork. They will ask to see your food safety management system (Safer Food Better Business or your own HACCP-based plan), temperature records, cleaning schedules, training records, allergen information, pest control reports and evidence that actions from the last report were closed. Anything that cannot be produced within a minute or two tends to be treated as missing.
5. The close. Before leaving, the officer summarises what they found, explains any legal contraventions and the action expected, and in most cases tells you the food hygiene rating there and then.

How the food hygiene rating is scored

The rating is not a gut feeling. The officer scores three areas separately, and the arithmetic is public.

• Hygienic food handling (cooking, cooling, reheating, storage, cross-contamination): scored 0, 5, 10, 15, 20 or 25.
• Structure and cleanliness of the premises (layout, condition, lighting, ventilation, pest control, facilities): scored 0, 5, 10, 15, 20 or 25.
• Confidence in management (your food safety management system, records, training and track record): scored 0, 5, 10, 20 or 30. Note there is no 15: a weak system jumps straight from 10 to 20.

Lower is better. The three scores are added together and the total gives a provisional rating: 0 to 15 is a 5, 20 is a 4, 25 to 30 is a 3, 35 to 40 is a 2, 45 to 50 is a 1, and anything above 50 is a 0. Then a second rule applies: the worst single score caps the rating. To get a 5, no area can score more than 5. For a 4 or a 3, no area can score more than 10; for a 2, no more than 15; for a 1, no more than 20.

That cap is where most surprises come from. A kitchen scoring 5 for hygiene and 5 for structure but 20 for confidence in management has a total of 30, which looks like a 3. Because 20 is above the limit for a 3, the rating drops to a 2. Clean kitchen, good practice, no usable records: two bands lost on paperwork alone.

What happens after the inspection

A written report follows, usually within a couple of weeks. It lists any contraventions of food hygiene law, recommendations, and deadlines. What comes with it depends on what was found.

• Advice or an informal letter for minor issues, with a date by which they should be fixed.
• A hygiene improvement notice where the law has been breached: a legal notice with a deadline, and an offence if it is ignored.
• A hygiene emergency prohibition notice where there is an imminent risk to health, which closes the premises or the affected part of it until the risk is removed.
• Prosecution for the most serious or repeated failures.

Your rating is published on ratings.food.gov.uk. In Wales and Northern Ireland you must display the sticker at your entrance; in England display is voluntary, but customers, delivery platforms and corporate clients check the website anyway. If you think the rating is wrong you have 21 days to appeal, and you can add a right-to-reply comment that is published alongside it. Once you have fixed the issues you can ask for a re-rating visit. Some councils charge for this, so it is worth getting everything right before you ask.

The five things that decide your score

Across hundreds of inspections the same handful of failures account for most lost bands. In rough order of how often they cost a rating:

• Records that do not exist, or cannot be found while the officer waits. Temperature logs, cleaning schedules and training records are the big three.
• Fridges or hot-holding equipment out of temperature at the moment the officer probes them.
• Raw and ready-to-eat food sharing storage, boards, cloths or prep space.
• Allergen information that does not match the current menu, or staff who cannot explain the allergen procedure.
• Cheap, visible structural faults: a blocked handwash basin, a cracked tile, a damaged chopping board, a gap under the back door.

None of them is difficult to fix. All of them are easy to miss when you are busy, which is exactly why officers find them. Walk your kitchen with the free EHO inspection checklist before the officer does, and if you would rather the records looked after themselves, try Hubl free for 14 days.

For a takeaway or delivery-only kitchen the rating decides whether the apps keep you listed. Our food safety for takeaways and dark kitchens page covers the platform thresholds, the re-rating visit and what officers check first.

Before the officer arrives, find out where you stand: our three-minute EHO readiness self-check scores your kitchen across the three areas officers use and shows the gaps to close first.