Daily routines & records
A checklist survives when every line changes a decision - fridge readings, probe checks, fan before flame at open; cooling, gas and bins at close. Everything else is decoration.
Why checklists fail
Most kitchens have opening and closing checks; most of those checks die within a month, reborn as a sheet of pre-ticked boxes signed at speed. They die because they were written to impress an inspector rather than to be done by a tired human at 7am or 11:45pm.
The format that survives is the one the FSA built into Safer Food Better Business: a short list of checks that genuinely decide whether the kitchen is safe to open or safe to leave, done by a named person, with anything abnormal written down along with what was done about it. That last clause is the legal heart of the exercise. The diary page with "fridge 2 read 9C - stock moved to fridge 1, engineer booked" is due diligence in its purest form; the page with fourteen unbroken ticks proves only that somebody owns a pen. Officers read the exceptions, not the ticks, and a checklist with occasional honest problems and actions carries far more weight than a perfect one. Everything on the list must pass a single test - if this check fails, would we actually do something before service? If the answer is no, it is not a check, it is decoration, and it belongs on a weekly or monthly schedule instead. What follows is the working core; add your site's specifics sparingly.
Start of day
Timing matters as much as content: the opening checks happen before prep starts, not alongside it, because half their value is catching the problem while there is still time to solve it. A fridge failure discovered at 7:05am is a stock shuffle and a phone call; the same failure discovered when the lunch mise is already loaded into it is a write-off and a menu crisis.
End of day
Keep a third, shorter list for the periodic checks the daily sheet should not carry: filter washes, descaling, seal inspections, the fortnightly look behind the line. Give each a day of the week or month and a name, and let the closing routine end with the same question every night - is there anything about this kitchen tonight that tomorrow's opener needs to know? Written in the diary, that one habit catches the slow failures every daily checklist misses.
Questions
A named individual with the authority to act on a failure - typically the opening chef and the closing supervisor. The signature matters because it converts the sheet from wallpaper into a decision record: this person read the fridge at 7C, saw the drift, and moved the stock. Rotating the duty is fine; anonymous ticks and end-of-week batch signing are what inspectors read as a system that exists only on paper.
Ten to fifteen minutes at each end of the day, done honestly. If your list takes longer, it is carrying items that belong on weekly or monthly schedules - descaling, filter cleans, glass and lighting checks. The daily list should hold only the checks that decide whether the kitchen is safe to open or safe to leave; the moment it becomes a burden, it becomes fiction.
Phoenix Duct Clean · by the numbers
Scheduled deep cleans behind, beneath and above the line - documented for your file, worked around your trading hours.