Set up your fridges and freezers, log daily and probe temperatures, and export the record for Environmental Health.
Childminders who keep a fridge, freezer or reheated food temperature record. Setup takes a couple of minutes, and each reading takes seconds.
No UK nation makes you write your fridge temperatures down. What the law does require is that you have food safety procedures and can show they work, and a temperature record is how most childminders show it — the diary pages in Safer Food, Better Business in England and Wales, and in CookSafe in Scotland. Most people keep it in a paper thermo book. KinderStart keeps it with the rest of your compliance records, so it is dated, named and ready to export.
Open the Tools tab, choose Business Settings, then Daily Operations, and set Kitchen / Food Temperatures to On. Save.
In Scotland it starts switched on, because Scotland is the one nation with a temperature written into food hygiene law (see step 4). Everywhere else it starts off. Either way the switch is yours: turn it on wherever you are if you keep a temperature record or your Environmental Health officer has asked for one, and turn it off in Scotland too if you don't cook on site.
Open Tools, choose Compliance Logs, then Kitchen / Food Temperatures. Tap Manage, give each appliance a name like "Kitchen fridge" or "0-2 room freezer", choose Fridge or Freezer, and tap Add appliance.
Each appliance keeps its own record, the same way the paper sheets have one per room.
Tap an appliance, type the reading, and save. KinderStart treats a fridge as in range from 0°C to 5°C, and a freezer at −18°C or below.
Those are the FSA's recommended settings, not the legal line. In England, Wales and Northern Ireland the law says chilled food must not be kept above 8°C; 5°C gives you room before you get near it. So a reading of 6°C is flagged here as something to look at, not as a breach.
If you take a second reading later in the day, tap the + next to the appliance instead of the row itself. Both are kept.
Under Reheating today, tap Add. Enter the food and the core temperature from your probe. The form shows the line that applies to you:
Wales follows the same rules as England on this. The 82°C figure is Scotland's alone.
Anything out of range is flagged as you type it, and an Action taken field appears. Write what you did — moved the food back to the hob, turned the fridge down, called out an engineer. The note is optional, but it is the part an inspector is looking for.
Type what the thermometer actually says. An out-of-range reading with a note explaining what you did is a far better record than a page of perfect numbers.
Tap View history & export, choose your date range, and the readings are grouped by appliance with reheating in its own section. Tap Export PDF for a document laid out like the paper sheets, with flagged rows marked and their notes shown.
Every reading is stamped with the date and whoever recorded it, including your assistant. Renaming or removing an appliance never changes the readings already taken — history and the export keep the name the reading was logged under, so an old sheet still makes sense a year later.
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KinderStart strives for accuracy. Competitor features and pricing comparisons are based on publicly available information as of May 2026. Details are subject to change by respective providers.