Equipment Management for Food Safety: An Overview
Welcome to the central hub for managing all your kitchen and food service equipment in Safe Food Pro. This system is designed to give you a clear, simple, and powerful way to track everything from temperature probes and thermometers to large assets like cool rooms and ovens.
Its core purpose is to ensure your equipment is clean, calibrated, and compliant with your Food Safety Plan. By keeping a detailed record of each item, you can easily manage cleaning schedules, verify calibration dates and prove due diligence during food safety audits.
This system is built on four core concepts that work together to keep you organised and audit-ready.
The Three Core Components
Think of your equipment system like a digital logbook for your entire kitchen. It's built to be flexible and scalable, whether you have a dozen items or several hundred across multiple locations.
[Image: A diagram or screenshot showing how Categories, Profiles, and the management tools work together on the Equipment Page.]
1. Organise with Categories
Categories are the foundation of your equipment system. They act as "smart folders" that you create to group similar types of equipment. For example, you could have a parent category for Refrigeration with sub-categories for Upright Freezers and Under-bench Fridges .
Most importantly, each Category defines the specific information (properties) you want to collect for all the equipment within it, such as Temperature Limits, Last Maintenance Date, ensuring consistency across your records.
2. Detail with Equipment Profiles
If Categories are the folders, then an Equipment Profile is the detailed file for a single piece of equipment. Each profile is a complete record, holding all the key information for that item, such as:
- Make, model, and serial number
- Clear photos for visual identification
- Calibration certificates and expiry dates
- QR codes for instant mobile access
- Its current status (e.g., Active, Out of Service for cleaning)
A well-maintained profile ensures that anyone on your team can instantly identify a piece of equipment and verify its compliance status.
3. Control with Management Tools
Once your equipment is organised into Categories and detailed in Profiles, you need to be able to find and manage it efficiently. The Equipment List page includes powerful tools to help you:
- Search and filter your entire inventory to find specific items in seconds.
- View equipment by its status, location, or category.
- Perform quick actions like duplicating an item's setup or archiving old equipment.
These tools are designed to make the day-to-day management of your kitchen equipment simple and fast.
4. Automate Work with Tasks
Tasks are the "action" engine of your equipment system. They allow you to assign, schedule, and track any work that needs to be done on a piece of equipment, turning your inventory into a proactive management tool. This ensures that crucial maintenance and compliance duties are never missed.
You can use tasks to:
- Schedule a recurring "Monthly Fridge Seal Clean" for your kitchen team.
- Automatically create a "Calibrate Probe Thermometer" task 30 days before its certificate expires.
- Assign an urgent "Fix Bain-Marie - Not Heating" task to a technician when a fault is found.
- Attach a specific "Deep Fryer Boil-Out Log" form that must be completed as part of the task.
Getting Started
Ready to set up your equipment? We recommend following these steps to get started correctly.
- Set Up Your Structure First: Begin by creating the Categories that make sense for your kitchen and your Food Safety Plan.
- Add Your Equipment: Once your categories are in place, you can start adding your individual pieces of equipment and filling out their profiles.
- Learn How: Creating and Managing Equipment
- Learn to Manage Your List: After your gear is in the system, familiarise yourself with the tools to find, filter, and manage it effectively.
- Learn How: Finding and Managing Your Kitchen Equipment
- Learn to utilise Tasks: Tasks can be used to action any work needed for your equipment