Donewell / Restaurants / Food temperature log

Food temperature log

A food temperature log is the record that cold food stayed cold and hot food stayed hot, taken three times a day. It has 13 items in 4 sections — opening, mid-shift, closing and corrective action. Of those, twelve ask for a reading and one is a note. Every reading has the range beside it, so the person holding the probe knows what a bad number looks like without asking anyone.

Tick it here — nothing is saved anywhere but this browser — or copy it into Donewell and have your staff sign each item off on their phone.

What temperatures does a restaurant have to record?

Cold holding at 33–41 °F — walk-in, line reach-in and cold well — freezers at −10–0 °F, and hot holding at 135–165 °F. This log takes them at open, mid-shift and close, which is the cadence most health departments expect to see and the one that actually catches a failing compressor before the product is gone. Your local code is the authority on the exact numbers; these are the ranges the ordinary US food code implies.

How long should a temperature log be kept?

Thirty days is the usual ask at an inspection, and a year is the useful answer. Logs are cheap to keep and expensive to reconstruct: the question at a claim or a complaint is always about a specific afternoon six weeks ago, and a clipboard sheet that lived by the walk-in until the end of the month cannot answer it.

What do you do with a reading that is out of range?

Write down what you did about it. The last item on this log is exactly that, and it is the part that turns a number into a defence: product moved to the other walk-in, service called at 4:10 pm, hot hold discarded at 3 pm after two hours below 135 °F. A log full of numbers that were all fine is a log nobody believes.

Last updated 17 September 2026