Pre-service line check

How it works

1. 1 Set out your line once: each station, and what's checked there and how. A probe for the cold rail and the hot well, a look for labels, a taste, stock to par, tools in place, clean. Start from a restaurant, food truck or café line and make it yours.
2. 2 Add your services and when the doors open. Before each one, start a check and walk the line station by station; every probe is judged as you type it.
3. 3 A miss asks what was done about it. A rail fixed or a soup reheated counts once it's probed again inside the line; anything else counts with a note.
4. 4 When everything's checked and every miss is fixed, initials sign the line ready, and it says how long before the doors that was.
5. 5 Food out of the cold to be prepped runs on a clock, with a warning before two hours. The last two weeks read as a strip, a square a service, with the rail that keeps missing called out. Print the check for the binder, or a blank week to fill in by hand.

Free. Signed out, it works on this page, and you can turn on Remember to keep it on this device. Try the made-up example to see a cold rail running warm and a soup that needed reheating; it's never kept. A batch cooked and cooled goes in the cook, hold & cool log, and the dish machine and buckets in the sanitizer log.

Good to know

Where do the lines come from?

Ontario's food premises regulation, O. Reg. 493/17, has hazardous food kept at 4 °C or colder, or at 60 °C or hotter (s.27). Frozen food is held to −18 °C or colder, as Health Canada advises. Labels, tastes, stock and tools aren't set by a rule; they're what makes a service go well (verify with your own health unit, and outside Ontario with your province's rules).

What's the two-hour clock?

Food can't always stay cold while it's being worked on: chicken being skewered, a tray of cream being piped. The regulation allows for that while food is being prepared, and a common guide is to keep it under two hours out of the cold in all (verify the time your health unit holds you to). Start a clock as it comes out, and say where it went: back in the cold, cooked or into the hot hold, used up, or thrown out. It warns at an hour and three quarters.

Why can't I sign with a miss open?

Because the point of a line check is that what was found got fixed before the first plate. A miss counts as fixed when you say what was done; if the fix was to bring the rail down or reheat the pan, it counts once a second probe is inside the line. Signed by mistake? Reopen it, for up to a day.

How does it spot a rail running warm?

It counts the misses on each thing checked over the last two weeks. When the same one misses three times or more, it's called out, with the warmest reading it saw. It's a nudge to look at the unit, not a diagnosis: a lid left off and a failing compressor read the same on a probe.

Where is it kept?

Signed in, your line and every check are kept in your LocoTap account, for you alone, never in a link or our logs, and you can download them with the rest of your account. A check keeps its own copy of the line, so changing the line later never changes a past check. Signed out, nothing is sent: it stays on this page, or on this device if you turn on Remember.

A record-keeping aid, not food safety or legal advice. Your health unit's rules come first.