How often should fridge temperatures be recorded?

No UK regulation sets a frequency. The law requires monitoring that is effective for your business and records commensurate with its nature and size. The FSA's Safer Food, Better Business pack is built around daily diary records, which is the practical standard most caterers are held to.

What temperature should a commercial fridge be?

gov.uk says chilled food must be kept at 8 °C or below, a legal requirement in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and advises setting the fridge to 5 °C or below so food stays cold enough even when the temperature fluctuates. In Scotland the regulations require food to be kept in a refrigerator, refrigerating chamber or cool ventilated place rather than to a stated figure.

Guide

Fridge and freezer temperature log: what to record

Updated 2026-08-15

There is no statutory form and no statutory frequency. What there is, is a legal duty to monitor your critical control points and to be able to show that you did.

The rule underneath the log sheet

Retained Regulation (EC) 852/2004, Article 5 requires a permanent procedure based on HACCP principles. Two of those principles do the work here: "establishing and implementing effective monitoring procedures at critical control points", and "establishing documents and records commensurate with the nature and size of the food business to demonstrate the effective application" of the rest. Refrigerated storage is a critical control point in almost every catering business, so it gets monitored, and the monitoring gets recorded.

There is no legal minimum frequency

This is worth saying plainly because a great deal of published advice implies otherwise. No UK regulation states how often you must check a fridge. What the law requires is that your monitoring is effective for your business, and that is a judgement your food safety management system makes and records. The FSA's Safer Food, Better Business diary is built around daily records, and that is the practical benchmark most inspectors will expect from a caterer using SFBB.

What to record

The unit. Which fridge, freezer, hot cupboard or display case, named the same way every time.
The reading and how it was taken. A probe reading, a display reading or a data logger reading are different things; note which.
The date and time. Times matter because both the England tolerances are time-limited: four hours for chilled display, two hours for hot holding.
Who took it. A name, not initials, if you can.
The corrective action when it is out of range. This is the entry that protects you. Article 5(2)(e) of 852/2004 requires "establishing corrective actions when monitoring indicates that a critical control point is not under control", so a log full of in-range numbers with no record of what happened on the day it failed is the weaker document.

The numbers to record against

8 °C, chilled
5 °C, the fridge setting
63 °C, hot holding
82 °C, reheating in Scotland

Probes and data loggers

Nothing in the regulations requires a particular instrument, and nothing requires a digital system. Annex II of retained 852/2004 asks food premises to "provide suitable temperature-controlled handling and storage conditions of sufficient capacity for maintaining foodstuffs at appropriate temperatures and designed to allow those temperatures to be monitored and, where necessary, recorded". A calibrated probe and a paper diary satisfy that. What automated logging changes is the labour and the gaps, not the legal position.

If your probe reading and your fridge display disagree, record both and act on the probe. A display that has drifted is exactly the sort of thing your monitoring is there to find.