HACCP finds the few steps in your kitchen that can make someone ill, sets a measurable limit for each and proves with records that you held it. This free checklist builds that plan for a restaurant kitchen from FSSAI's own guidance, with the cooking, cooling, holding and reheating limits an inspector and a hygiene rating auditor check. Updated November 2026.
No HACCP certificate is required, but a licence carries a duty to identify your critical steps. What you face is the officer's inspection, and you can choose the hygiene rating. The annual third-party audit, as the Ministry described it in March 2026, is not yours.
FSSAI's 5 initial steps and 7 principles, each turned into one question about your kitchen.
Receiving, cold storage, thawing, cooking, hot holding, cooling, reheating, delivery and frying oil, each with its limit, check, action if missed and record.
Tested water, named suppliers, separation of raw and cooked, signs of pests, cleaning and fit, trained food handlers.
What to keep, signed twice and kept a year, and who checks the checking, with the yearly review.
Eight checks in twenty minutes, the week before an inspection, a rating audit or a client visit.
Petpooja POSS lets you add Preparation Steps to each menu item, shown to the kitchen on the KDS (on Electron POS and POS Local), so the cooking and reheating limit sits beside the recipe. Food that fails a check is recorded as wastage in the inventory dashboard.
Explore Petpooja POSSMost HACCP checklists online are written for factories abroad. For an Indian restaurant, a HACCP certificate is not required: FSSAI's own food safety guide for the catering sector calls its HACCP section recommendatory, and sets out a plan of 5 initial steps and 7 principles. The once-a-year third-party audit that vendors sell is, on the Health Ministry's own account, for central-licensed food manufacturers, not restaurants.
The thinking behind HACCP is a duty, though. Schedule 4 Part II, which binds every licensed food business, says you shall identify the steps critical to food safety and keep safety procedures for them, implemented and reviewed periodically. A HACCP plan is the clearest way to show you have.
What a restaurant does face is the Food Safety Officer's inspection. It follows a checklist for catering and food service, and its starred questions, the ones that fail you on their own, are mostly cooking, cooling, holding and reheating temperatures, water, pests and records. Our FSSAI catering checklist walks that sheet question by question.
You can also choose the FSSAI hygiene rating, which shows customers 1 to 5 smileys for two years. Its food service checklist sets stricter temperatures than Schedule 4 does, so this checklist uses the stricter figure each time: meet it and you meet both.
A HACCP plan is the cheapest way to be ready for all of these, because the plan's critical control points and the officer's starred questions are very nearly the same list.
Here's a preview of what you'll get inside:
A HACCP plan in FSSAI's catering guidance: 5 initial steps and 7 principles.
Source: FSSAI catering guidance, October 2017, read 03-Nov-2026The reheating core temperature on the hygiene rating food service checklist. Schedule 4 Part V sets 74°C.
Source: FSSAI Hygiene Rating guidance, January 2021, Annexure 2A, read 03-Nov-2026How long documentation and records are retained, on a starred question of the hygiene rating checklist.
Source: FSSAI Hygiene Rating guidance, January 2021, Annexure 2A, read 03-Nov-2026On the Ministry's March 2026 account, the once-a-year third-party audit is for central-licensed food manufacturers. A restaurant may still choose an audit, or a client may ask for one, but it is a choice or a contract term, not FSSAI law.
A HACCP plan in a drawer is not a control. The plan is the logs, filled in every shift by the people on the line.
A probe that reads 3°C high makes every log wrong. Check it against boiling water and melting ice, and write the result down.
Cooked food that is still warm after two hours is the classic gap. Use shallow containers and an ice bath, and store it so it chills, as our cold storage ideas show.
Schedule 4 Part V says never reheat food on a steam table, in a bain marie or under a heat lamp. Reheat it properly first, then hold it.
The starred question is about signs of pests, not paperwork. Our pest control and hygiene audit checklist covers both.
Discarded food is a deviation to log and a cost to count. Our food waste cost calculator shows what it adds up to.
| Aspect | Without a plan | With this checklist |
|---|---|---|
| Which audit applies | Unclear, or an audit bought by default | Inspection, hygiene rating and HACCP told apart |
| Temperature limits | Remembered, or copied from a foreign sheet | FSSAI's stricter figure for each step |
| Cooling | Left on the counter | 60°C to 21°C in 2 hours, then 5°C in 2 more |
| When a limit is missed | Decided on the spot | A corrective action written beside each limit |
| Records | Filled in before the visit | Signed twice and kept for a year |
| Checking the checking | Nobody | A weekly read by someone else and a yearly review |
Swipe the table sideways to see the full comparison.
Download the free HACCP audit checklist and set your limits before the next inspection.
Petpooja is India's leading SME business software suite, trusted by 1,50,000+ businesses across restaurants, retail, healthcare, manufacturing, and more. From billing and payroll to task management and procurement Petpooja helps Indian businesses run better, every day.
Our guide to setting up preparation steps on a KDS shows how to write the cooking and reheating limits into each recipe. Track what fails a check as food wastage, and rotate stock by FIFO. Ask for a walkthrough of Petpooja POSS.
