Food safety software · Deli
Hot holding is a number held all day.
One reading at the start of service proves nothing about hour five. Deli risk sits in the long tail of a service period, in a slicer between products, and in the moment food leaves its original packaging and becomes your responsibility.
No card required · Live the same day · FSAI and EHO ready
Hot holding, minimum
For the whole service period, evidenced — not checked once and assumed.
Where ready-to-eat goes wrong
Between products, between shifts, and logged as a task rather than a habit.
When it becomes yours
Out of the original pack, the allergen and date information becomes your record.
Why deli is different
Almost everything on a deli counter is ready to eat. Nothing downstream kills anything.
Chilled ready-to-eat, long shelf life
Listeria grows at refrigeration temperatures, and cooked meats, soft cheeses and prepared salads sit in the highest-risk category there is. Cleaning and temperature are the controls.
Slicer and surface cleaning, evidenced
A service period, not a moment
Held at or above 63°C throughout, with the time in the unit tracked as well as the temperature. Most paper logs record the start and nothing else.
Checked hourly, prompted automatically
You become the food business
The moment product comes out of its supplier packaging into your tray, the use-by and the allergen information have to be carried across by you and recorded.
Decant records with date and allergen
Deli controls
The counter checks
that hold up at inspection.
Hot holding across the whole service
A prompt every hour rather than a sign-off at the end, with the reading recorded against the limit. A unit that drifts at 2pm gets caught at 2pm.
- Hourly prompts through the service period
- Reading recorded against your critical limit
- Time in unit tracked, not just temperature
Slicer and equipment cleaning, as a record
Between raw and ready-to-eat, between allergen products, and at end of day. Photo evidence on the task turns a habit into something you can show.
- Clean-down tasks with photo evidence
- Between-product cleaning scheduled, not assumed
- Sign-off by named person on every clean
Chilled display, monitored not spot-checked
A display cabinet opened and closed all day by staff and customers behaves nothing like a sealed fridge. Continuous readings show the pattern a probe misses.
- Display cabinets monitored continuously
- Alerts on a drift, escalated if nobody acts
- Overnight and weekend cover with no gaps
Decanting and use-by, carried across
When product leaves its original packaging the date and allergen information transfers to your record. That transfer is a task on a sheet, with the code captured.
- Decant records with supplier batch and use-by
- Allergen information carried from the source
- Discard prompted when a date expires
Allergen information for loose food
A customer asking about a sandwich filling is asking a legal question. The answer has to come from current recipe and ingredient records, not from whoever is on the counter.
- Allergen data held against each ingredient
- Answers derived from the current recipe
- Supplier specification changes flagged for review
Hot holding
Two readings a day is
not a service period.
A bain-marie checked at midday and again at close leaves five hours undocumented in the middle. If a unit lost temperature at half one, nothing in your records shows it and nothing prompted anyone to act.
Hourly prompts through service turn hot holding from a sign-off into actual monitoring, and the record that comes out the other end is a line rather than two dots.
Prompted, not remembered
The check appears when it is due, so it does not depend on a supervisor noticing the clock during a rush.
A drift becomes an action
A reading under the limit asks for the corrective action there and then, while somebody is still at the counter.
The record is continuous
Hourly entries across a service read as monitoring. Two entries a day read as a box being ticked.
Deli check sheets
Built for a deli counter
before you log in.
Start from the deli template and adjust it to your counter, your units and your service hours.
Food Guard revolutionised our food safety processes. It’s user-friendly, efficient, and ensures we meet ISO 22000 standards. The preventive controls and hazard analysis features are game-changers.
Caoilinn Q. — Quality Assurance Manager
Common questions
Deli food safety
questions, answered.
How do we evidence hot holding across a whole service?
By scheduling the check hourly rather than at open and close. Each unit is prompted on the phone at the due time, the reading is entered against your critical limit, and a reading below it asks for the corrective action immediately. What comes out is a continuous record across the service period rather than two entries with five hours of nothing between them.
Can it cover slicer cleaning and listeria controls?
Cleaning is set up as scheduled tasks — between raw and ready-to-eat, between allergen products and at end of day — each signed off by a named person with photo evidence where it is useful. Listeria control in a deli is largely a cleaning and temperature control, and both sit in the same system so an auditor sees them together.
What happens when we decant product from its original packaging?
That is recorded as its own task. The supplier batch code, the use-by and the allergen information are captured at the point of decanting so they carry across to your tray rather than being lost with the packaging. A discard can then be prompted when the date is reached.
A customer asks what is in a sandwich filling. Where does that answer come from?
From the ingredient and recipe records rather than from whoever is on the counter. Allergen information is held against each ingredient, so the declaration for a made-up item is derived from its current recipe. If a supplier changes a specification it is flagged and the affected items are listed for review.
Do we need the temperature sensors for a deli?
Not necessarily. Manual probing on the app is valid monitoring on its own. The strongest case for sensors in a deli is the chilled display, which is opened and closed constantly and behaves nothing like a sealed fridge, and the back-of-house chills over a weekend. Hot holding is usually probed manually because the check is happening during service anyway.
Your counter checks, running tomorrow.
Start from the deli template, set your service hours and let the hourly prompts do the remembering.