Restaurant HACCP plan
Answer questions. Get the plan.
Sage asks about the food you actually cook, and writes it from your answers.
Three minutes tells you whether she can write yours. No account, nothing to install.
Not a template to fill in. One short question at a time — out loud if you like — for about an hour, and you can stop whenever you want. For restaurants, food trucks, carts, cafés, delis, ghost kitchens and caterers in the United States, against the FDA 2026 Food Code.
Most restaurants are not required to have one. Then somebody asks.
It is worth being straight about this, because a lot of pages selling HACCP software are not. The FDA Food Code requires a written HACCP plan for specialized processes — reduced-oxygen packaging, curing, acidifying for shelf stability and the rest — and those need a variance from your regulator as well. A conventional restaurant cooking to order is usually not in that bracket.
What happens instead is that somebody with authority over your business asks for one, and then you need it quickly:
A health inspector asked
Often after a finding, and often with a date attached.
A permit or licence application
The form has a blank for it and will not process without one.
A commissary or landlord
Mobile units in particular — no plan, no slot.
An insurer or a franchisor
Usually as a condition rather than a request.
You are opening
The best week to find out your menu needs a process authority is not opening week.
You decided to
Nobody asked. You would rather have it written down properly.
The hard part was never the formatting
A blank template hands you headings. It cannot tell you which of your dishes are TCS foods, which steps genuinely control a hazard, which hazards you are entitled to rule out, or what number belongs in the critical limit column with a source behind it. If you knew all that, you would not be reading this.
What you end up holding
The binder — cover page and document control, scope and regulatory baseline, responsible persons, the TCS food table, a card and flow diagram per dish, the facility flow chart, hazard analysis with the hazards you ruled out and why, CCP determination, critical limits with the source each one came from, monitoring, corrective actions, verification, recordkeeping, your sign-off page and a citations appendix.
And the things that go on the wall
Only the SOPs your operation needs, drawn from 34 reviewed modules — seventeen always on, seventeen that switch on from your own answers. Posters, a checks card, and every blank log the plan relies on. Each document is numbered, like HP-4F2A91-SOP-06, so you can hand an inspector a document by number.
What the hour looks like
- 1
Two minutes in
A real cover page with your business on it, and four sections already filling behind it.
- 2
Three minutes in
The special-process screen. Sous vide, vacuum packing, curing, acidified sushi rice and thirteen others stop the conversation and point you at a process authority. You learn that before the hour, not after the payment.
- 3
Ten minutes in
A food truck watches three documents appear — water supply, waste retention, commissary servicing — because it answered “mobile”.
- 4
About an hour in
All 118 questions. Every section, every SOP you need, every blank log, the flow chart at full length. The finalize gate opens.
You upload a photo of your menu rather than typing every dish. Nothing is invented — when a required fact is missing the document prints [needs answer: …] instead of plausible filler, because a plan with a guessed fact in it is worse than an unfinished one.
What Sage will not do
She builds plans for restaurants in the United States against the FDA 2026 Food Code. She cannot finish a plan involving a special process — sous vide, reduced-oxygen or vacuum packaging, cook-chill, curing, preservation smoking, acidification including acidified sushi rice, fermentation for safety, sprouting, raw molluscan shellfish, juice HACCP, unpasteurized products or low-acid canned foods. Seventeen are screened early and a yes stops the conversation. Canada is not supported yet. Local authorities can require more than the Food Code, and no regulator has approved, certified or guaranteed any document she produces.
Questions people ask first
- Does the law require my restaurant to have a HACCP plan?
- Usually not by itself. The FDA Food Code requires a written HACCP plan for specialized processes — things like reduced-oxygen packaging, curing or acidifying for shelf stability — and those also need a variance from your regulator. Most restaurants end up writing one because somebody asked: a health department after an inspection, a permit or licence application, a commissary or landlord, an insurer, or a franchisor. Your local authority sets the rule, and they can require more than the Food Code does.
- What goes in a restaurant HACCP plan?
- Business and facility identification, the scope and regulatory baseline, who is responsible, a description of the operation, the TCS food table, a card and flow diagram for each dish, the facility flow chart, hazard analysis including the hazards you ruled out and why, critical control point determination, critical limits with the source each came from, monitoring, corrective actions, verification, recordkeeping, a plan review procedure, your sign-off page, and a sources appendix. The SOPs and blank logs the plan relies on come with it.
- How long does it take to write one?
- With Sage it is about an hour — 118 questions about your own kitchen, answered in your own words, and you can stop and resume because every answer is saved. The comparison that matters is not an hour against a form; it is an hour against the weeks of back-and-forth a consultant engagement usually takes.
- Can I use a template instead?
- A blank template gives you the formatting, which was never the hard part. The hard part is deciding which of your dishes are TCS foods, which steps are genuine control points, which hazards you are entitled to rule out, and what number belongs in the critical limit column with a source behind it. A template cannot answer any of that about your kitchen. Our free printable logs are genuinely useful and free; a plan is not a form to fill in.
- What if my menu includes sous vide or cured meats?
- Then you need a process authority — a qualified person who validates your specific process, usually alongside a variance from your health department. No software substitutes for that. Sage screens seventeen of these special processes at roughly question six and stops the conversation rather than selling you a plan she cannot finish.
- Is the plan approved by a regulator?
- No, and any product implying otherwise is one to walk away from. The plan states its own regulatory baseline, its source and version dates, and a plain statement that local authorities may require more. No regulator has approved, certified or guaranteed it.
Ten minutes of questions will tell you more than this page did
Answer for a few minutes and look at what has been built. If a special process stops you, you will know inside three minutes and you will not have paid anything.
Build the whole plan free. Pay at the end for the signable version.
Prefer to read first? The full account of what this does and refuses to claim is worth ten minutes, and the free printable logs are useful tonight whether or not you ever build a plan.
Written by Andrew Langevin. Restaurants, food trucks, carts, cafés, delis, ghost kitchens and caterers in the United States.