11 degrees at the door is not a delivery

Temperature is the topic where teams most often end up arguing with a driver. The box comes off the tail lift, someone puts a hand on the cardboard, and the sentence follows: it’s still cold enough. That is not a measurement. In the questions we ask, chilled goods arrive at 11°C. The right answer is to reject them.

Seven degrees, unless the label is stricter

Most chilled foods are kept at 7°C or lower. Above that line, at receiving, you do not accept the batch. Quickly putting it in your own fridge does not count as a correction. An hour at 4°C does not undo the bacterial growth during transport.

7°C is the usual upper limit, not a free pass for everything. If the label states a lower temperature, that applies. Fresh chicken, mince or a sauce with its own instructions may need to be colder. The hygiene code and the label together, not one number you remember as the only rule.

Five hours to cool down

Cooked food that goes back into the fridge is cooled, according to the hygiene code, from 60°C to 7°C or lower within five hours. A full, covered gastronorm tray in an overloaded fridge rarely makes it. Shallow trays, smaller volumes, and not on top of products that are already cold: that is the practical side of the same rule.

Hot holding during service is on the other side. At least 60°C. 40°C or 50°C feels hot to your finger and is still the zone where growth is fast. 75°C is not a hot-holding temperature in this test; that number belongs to a different step, not to the bain-marie that stays open all lunch.

What you write down

A measurement you do not record does not exist during an inspection. Note the time, the product and the reading, even when the reading is disappointing. A log that shows nothing but 4.0 for a whole year is exactly the reason for an inspector to stay longer.

The context of those numbers, the seven principles around them, is in what HACCP means.