Twenty years in hospitality means I’ve filled in a lot of paper diaries, and in the last few years I’ve watched a genuine market of digital alternatives show up. I built Rated5 because none of them did the whole job properly — a real digital diary, built directly on the FSA’s own Safer Food Better Business structure, with corrective actions, safe methods sign-off and training records included as standard, not bolted on or gated behind a higher tier. Here’s an honest, dated look at how the market stacks up, checked 17/07/2026.
The shape of the market
Digital food-safety tools in the UK broadly fall into five categories, and most of them only do part of the job.
Digitised-pack tools take the FSA’s Safer Food Better Business pack and put it on a screen, often just letting you scan in pages you’ve already filled in by hand — a step up from paper, but still a scanner, not a full system. SFBB+ is the clearest example of this category.
Focused checks apps cover the daily essentials — temperatures, cooking logs, deliveries, checklists — and deliberately stop there, leaving corrective actions, safe methods and training records uncovered. Get Lemon fits here.
Broad operations platforms fold food safety into a much wider (and much pricier) set of tools — brand audits, cashing up, rotas, dashboards. Trail, part of The Access Group, is built for large multi-site groups who want food safety as one small module inside a bigger, expensive operations system.
Consultancy-attached tools pair software with an ongoing paid relationship with a food-safety consultancy. Hubl, built by the consultancy Complete Food Safety, gates its own features behind tiered pricing on top of that.
Offline-local tools keep every record on a single device, with no account and no cloud — no way for a second team member to see the same diary, and nothing backed up if the phone is lost. food-safety.app is built this way.
Rated5 is the one product built specifically to cover the whole job: the full SFBB structure, entered directly rather than scanned in, with corrective actions, safe-methods sign-off and training records included as standard — cloud-based and shared across your whole team, at one flat, published price.
What’s actually worth checking
Whichever product you’re looking at, these are the questions that matter more than the feature list on the homepage — and where Rated5 is built to answer “yes” on every one.
Is it built on the structure your EHO already recognises? Safer Food Better Business isn’t just a checklist format — it’s what officers are trained to look for. Rated5 is built directly on that structure, section for section.
Are records genuinely tamper-evident? Can an entry be edited or deleted after the fact? Rated5’s records are append-only — nothing is ever edited or backdated, so the diary you hand over is provably the diary that was kept.
Does it know your nation’s rules, specifically? Reheat temperatures differ between Scotland and the rest of the UK, for one real example. Rated5 applies the correct thresholds automatically for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
What happens to your records if you leave? Rated5 never auto-deletes anything, and the account owner can export a complete archive of every record, for every premises, at any time — regardless of subscription status.
The market, in one paragraph each
Get Lemon (£19/location/month, flat) covers fast daily checks well, but its published feature list stops there — no confirmed corrective-action workflow, safe methods, or tamper-evidence. See the full Rated5 vs Get Lemon comparison →
SFBB+ (£4.99/month per premises) is a low-cost way to scan your existing paper pack into an app — but it’s a scanner, not a system: no corrective actions, safe methods sign-off or training records published. See the full Rated5 vs SFBB+ comparison →
Trail (per site — third-party listings show £38 to £82.50/month, on 12-month contracts) folds food safety into a much broader, much pricier operations platform as part of The Access Group — a 12-month commitment for a checklist module, not dedicated food-safety software. See the full Rated5 vs Trail comparison →
Hubl (tiered, roughly £19 to £65-plus/month with features gated by tier) pairs its app with an available consultancy relationship — but key features are locked behind higher, partly quote-based tiers. See the full Rated5 vs Hubl comparison →
food-safety.app (£6.99/month or £69.99/year) is cheap but deliberately has no account and no cloud — everything lives on one device, with no way for a second person to see the same diary. See the full Rated5 vs food-safety.app comparison →
Where Rated5 sits
Rated5 is £14.99/month or £144/year per premises, no contract, cancel any time, 14-day trial with no card required. It’s built specifically on the FSA’s Safer Food Better Business structure, with per-nation rules for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, tamper-evident append-only records, guided corrective actions, versioned safe-methods sign-off, training tracked to expiry, and a read-only inspection view for the EHO visit — cloud-based, shared across your whole team, with every entry attributed to a named person.
Every other product on this list covers part of that. Rated5 is the one built to cover all of it, at one flat price, with nothing gated behind a higher tier. The comparison pages go through the detail feature by feature, dated and sourced the same way this post is — or you can just start a 14-day free trial and see for yourself.