Hazard Analysis for Restaurants: The Step-by-Step Process

By Zynthio. Published 23 September 2026. Editorial policy

General information for UK hospitality operators, not legal advice. If something here is wrong or out of date, the editorial policy explains how to report it.

Hazard analysis is the HACCP step most restaurant plans leave thin: describing the process, listing hazards per step and choosing the CCPs.

Hazard analysis is the step where a restaurant works through its own menu and process, writes down everything that could make the food unsafe, and decides which of those hazards needs a critical control point. It comes before the CCPs, the limits and the monitoring, because none of those mean anything until the hazards they exist to control have been named. The duty sits in Article 5 of Regulation (EC) 852/2004, which requires a food business operator to put in place a permanent procedure based on the HACCP principles, the first of which is identifying the hazards that must be prevented, eliminated or reduced to acceptable levels. Most restaurant plans go thin at this step rather than at the monitoring, because the hazard list was copied from another business instead of built from the kitchen it is meant to describe.

Step 1: Describe the product and the process

Nothing can be analysed until the scope is written down. Start with what the kitchen actually makes, grouped by process rather than by dish: cook and serve, cook and cool and reheat, prepared cold, and bought in ready to eat. For each group, record the ingredients that carry risk, how the food is stored, how long it is kept, how it is served, and who eats it.

Who eats it changes the answer. A care home lunch, a children's menu and a bar snack carry different consequences from the same organism, and the description is where that gets recorded rather than assumed. Government guidance is plain that the type of food safety management system a business needs depends on the size of the business, its risk level and complexity. A cafe selling sandwiches and hot drinks for the same day needs to identify its key food safety risks, keep chilled food at safe temperatures and provide allergen information; a kitchen cooking, cooling and reheating in bulk has far more steps to account for.

Done looks like one page per process group, written in the words the kitchen actually uses, dated and signed.

Step 2: Draw the flow from delivery to service

The flow diagram is the spine of the analysis. List every step the food passes through, in order, from taking a delivery through storage, thawing, preparation, cooking, cooling, chilled storage, reheating, hot holding and service. Add the steps that are easy to forget: decanting, portioning, transfer between sites, and what happens to food that comes back from a function.

Draw it, then walk it. A flow written at a desk describes the kitchen the manager believes exists. Walking the same route on a Saturday evening usually adds two or three steps nobody had written down, and those unwritten steps are where hazards sit unexamined. Grouping dishes by process keeps the diagram short: a restaurant with sixty dishes rarely has more than six or seven distinct flows.

Done looks like a numbered flow per process group, every step named once, confirmed by somebody who works that section rather than by the person who drew it.

Step 3: List the hazards at every step

Take the flow one step at a time and ask what could go wrong there. Government guidance defines a food hazard as anything that could make food unsafe to eat, and groups hazards as microbiological, chemical and physical, with allergens named inside the chemical group. Many restaurants pull allergens out as a fourth category, because the controls and the records behind them are nothing like the controls on a sanitiser.

Two habits keep this section honest. Name the hazard rather than the failing: poor hygiene is not a hazard, whereas harmful bacteria carried from raw chicken to a salad on a shared board is one. And attach every hazard to a step, because a hazard with no step against it can never be controlled or monitored.

Allergen hazards also carry a labelling duty of their own, since full ingredient and allergen labelling on food prepacked for direct sale has applied since 1 October 2021. The detail behind that sits in allergen management and Natasha's Law.

Step 4: Judge likelihood against severity

Every hazard on the list now takes two judgements: how likely it is to happen in this kitchen, and how badly it would end if it did. No scale is written into the regulation, so which scale a venue uses matters far less than using one scale consistently and writing down the reason behind each score.

Likelihood is the half operators get wrong, because it is usually guessed. The evidence is already in the building: failed checks, out-of-range fridge readings, repeat defects on the same piece of equipment, customer complaints, the dish that keeps coming back. A hazard that has actually occurred twice this year is not unlikely, whatever a template says.

Severity is judged on the consequence, not on the inconvenience. An allergen error and a piece of packaging in a dessert both reach the customer, and they do not end the same way. Scoring them alike is how a plan arrives at twenty equally urgent hazards and no order of priority.

Done looks like a score against every hazard, with a sentence of reasoning beside it that somebody else could follow and challenge.

Step 5: Decide what needs a CCP and what a prerequisite handles

This is the decision the whole analysis exists to reach. A critical control point is a step at which control is essential to prevent or eliminate a hazard, or to reduce it to an acceptable level, and where a critical limit separates acceptability from unacceptability. Two tests settle most cases: is this the last step that can bring the hazard under control, and can somebody read the result off an instrument.

Cooking, cooling, hot holding and reheating usually pass both tests, because each one has a measurable limit behind it. Food cooked or reheated in England, Wales and Northern Ireland must reach 75C at the core, while in Scotland reheated food must reach 82C. Hot food must be held at 63C or above. In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, food that needs refrigeration must be kept at 8C or below, though it may sit above 8C for display or service for a single period of up to four hours. Cooling is the odd one out: Food Standards Agency guidance is to get cooked food into the fridge within 90 minutes, which is guidance rather than a figure written into the regulations, so the venue sets its own limit and monitors against it. Holding on to those readings is a job in itself, covered in temperature monitoring records that survive an EHO visit.

Most of the remaining hazards belong to the prerequisite programmes rather than to a CCP. Cleaning, pest control, supplier approval, staff training, personal hygiene and maintenance control hazards across every step rather than at one, which is why the Safer Food, Better Business pack carries cross-contamination, cleaning, chilling and cooking as standing procedures with a diary behind them. That pack applies to England and Wales; for Northern Ireland the equivalent is the safe catering guidance.

Done looks like a short list of CCPs, each with a limit somebody can measure, and an explicit note against every other hazard naming the prerequisite that controls it.

What a thin hazard analysis looks like to an inspector

Four patterns give a borrowed plan away, and an officer sees all four regularly.

• Hazards listed with no process step against them, so nothing can be monitored and no corrective action has a trigger.
• A CCP declared at every step, which usually means none of them is genuinely critical and the monitoring load has become unworkable.
• Menu changes that never reached the plan. Article 5 is explicit that when any modification is made in the product, process or any step, the operator reviews the procedure and makes the necessary changes to it.
• No reasoning anywhere. A score with no sentence behind it cannot be defended two years later, once the person who wrote it has left.

The officer is entitled to ask for proof: the regulation requires operators to give the competent authority evidence of their compliance in the manner that authority requires, taking account of the nature and size of the business. A local food safety team may also advise that a larger or higher-risk business needs a full HACCP plan rather than a toolkit. The wider job of assembling a plan that holds up is set out in building a HACCP plan your EHO will respect.

Keeping this on the record

Hazard analysis counts as finished only when it is written down, dated and kept current. Article 5 asks for documents and records commensurate with the nature and size of the food business, for the documents describing the procedures to be up to date at all times, and for other records to be retained for an appropriate period. In practice that means the flow, the hazard list, the scores, the reasoning and the review date live in one place, and a review is triggered by a menu or supplier change rather than by an annual reminder nobody sets.

Zynthio builds the process flow, hazard analysis, decision tree, CCPs and critical limits per site or as an organisation master plan, and links a CCP to a checklist task so the daily readings land against the plan instead of in a separate folder. Its HACCP export covers 90 days, which is the span an inspection tends to ask about. Two limits are worth knowing first: monitoring frequency is free text and is not enforced, and the process flow prints as a table rather than a diagram. See how Zynthio handles HACCP if the analysis currently sits in a spreadsheet nobody has opened since the menu changed.

See how Zynthio handles this