Donewell / Restaurants / Health inspection prep checklist

Health inspection prep checklist

A health inspection prep checklist is a self-inspection you run before somebody else runs theirs. It has 22 items in 8 sections — documentation, hand washing, cold holding, hot holding, sanitizer, storage, facility and notes. Of those, six ask for a reading, five ask for a photo and one is a note; the rest are a tick. It is ordered by what gets cited rather than by where things are, which is why documentation comes before the floor.

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 do health inspectors check most often?

The same short list almost everywhere: hand sinks blocked or unstocked, cold holding above 41 °F, raw meat stored above ready-to-eat food, food unlabelled or undated, sanitizer out of the 200–400 ppm band, and chemicals stored next to product. Those six account for most of the points lost in a routine visit, and every one of them is something a shift could have fixed in the ten minutes before the inspector walked in.

How do you prepare for a health inspection?

Run this once a week, not the morning you are expecting a visit — unannounced is the whole point of the visit. Start with paperwork, because permits, food handler cards and thirty days of temperature logs are the cheapest points on the sheet and the ones that cannot be fixed while somebody is standing there. Then hand sinks, then cold and hot holding with a probe, then sanitizer and the dish machine at 180–195 °F final rinse.

Why does a health inspection score matter?

Because it is public. In most cities the grade goes in the window or on a county website that people read before booking, and the failure behind a lost point is almost always something that was supposed to be documented and was not. That is the argument for photographing the five items here that an inspector would have to take your word for otherwise.

Last updated 17 September 2026