Where your food may come from — approved source, storage, and when it has to be thrown out

Most of this site is about temperature, because temperature is where the money and the anxiety are. Underneath it sit four quieter rules that decide something more basic: whether the thing in your walk-in counts as food at all.

They answer four questions in order. Where may it come from. What happens to it once it arrives. What keeps it separate from everything that would spoil it. And when does it stop being food and become waste.

The sentence everything else hangs off

Food is to be safe, unadulterated, and honestly presented.¹

Worth pausing on the third one, because it is the only food safety requirement on this site that is not about biology. “Honestly presented” is about description — a fish sold as one species that is another, a dish described as made with butter that is made with something else. It is enforced by the same inspector, under the same code, as the walk-in temperature.

Approved source

Food is to be obtained from sources that comply with law.²

One line, and it is the foundation. What it means in practice is that your supplier is operating under whatever inspection and licensing regime applies to what they sell — which is why the invoice matters. An invoice is not bookkeeping here; it is the record of where the food came from, and it is what an inspector asks for when the question arises.

Food made in a home is not permitted. The code is direct:

food prepared in a private home is not permitted to be used or offered for human consumption in a food service operation or retail food establishment²

The exceptions — cottage food, a registered home bakery, certain maple and honey products — are exceptions for the producer, not permission for your kitchen. A cottage food operator may lawfully make and sell their product; that does not make it something you may plate. If someone is offering to supply you from their kitchen, selling food from home explains what they are and are not allowed to do.

The same rule catches the friendlier version: a cook bringing in something they made at home for staff meal is one thing, and putting it on a plate for a paying guest is another.

Wild game may not be received for sale or service.

Wild game animals are not to be received for sale or service by a food service operation or retail food establishment.²

This one is worth reading alongside the custom processing rule, because the two are easily conflated. You may lawfully process a hunter’s animal for that hunter — it goes home with them, marked not for sale — under the rule covered in special processes.⁵ Selling it, or serving it, is a different act, and this rule closes it.

Eggs are to be received clean and sound, meeting at least USDA consumer grade B, and egg products are to be obtained pasteurized.²

Shellstock tags have a rule that is unusual in that it is printed on the thing it governs. The tag stays attached to the container until it is empty or retagged, and then goes on file — and the tag itself is required to carry this statement in bold capitals:

This tag is required to be attached until container is empty or retagged and thereafter kept on file for ninety days²

Ninety days, filed, per container. It is the single most commonly missing record in an operation that serves oysters, and the rule went to the trouble of writing itself onto the tag.

Shellfish also may not be removed from the container they arrived in other than immediately before sale or preparation, outside specific display and repacking conditions.²

After the truck leaves

Everything above is about what arrives. This rule is about the hours and days afterward, and it is where most of the daily practice lives.

Separation. Raw animal foods must be kept apart, during storage, preparation, holding and display, from raw ready-to-eat food (including raw fish for sushi and molluscan shellfish), from cooked ready-to-eat food, and from fruits and vegetables before they are washed.³

And types of raw animal food must be separated from each other — beef, fish, lamb, pork, poultry — by one of:³

• using separate equipment for each type; or
• arranging each type in equipment so that cross contamination of one type with another is prevented; and
• preparing each type at different times or in separate areas

Here is the part worth knowing precisely. The famous ladder — chicken on the bottom, then ground meat, then whole cuts, seafood and produce on top, ordered by final cook temperature — is not in the rule. The phrase “cooking temperature” does not appear in it. What the rule requires is the outcome: arrange things so cross contamination is prevented.

The ladder is the ordinary, well-understood way to achieve that, and it is what an inspector expects to see because it is what works. But knowing it is a method rather than the rule tells you what to do in the cases the ladder does not cover — a single shelf, an undercounter drawer, a prep table during service. The question to answer is always “can what is above drip onto what is below,” not “is this the order from the poster.”

One express allowance: frozen, commercially processed and packaged raw animal food may be stored or displayed with or above frozen, commercially processed and packaged ready-to-eat food.³

Covering. Food is to be stored in packages, covered containers or wrappings — with limited exceptions including whole uncut raw produce, primal cuts on sanitized hooks or racks, and shellstock.³

And the list of places food may not be stored, which is worth reading literally because most kitchens violate at least one of them at some point:

• In locker rooms
• In toilet rooms
• In dressing rooms
• In garbage rooms
• In mechanical rooms
• Under sewer lines that are not shielded to intercept potential drips
• Under leaking water lines, including leaking sprinkler heads, or lines on which water has condensed
• Under open stairwells
• Under any other source of contamination³

The condensation clause is the one that catches people. A line that is not leaking but sweats in August is on this list, and the case of dry goods that has lived under it since spring is the finding.

When it has to go

The last rule is short and absolute. Food must be discarded — or reconditioned under an approved procedure where that is permitted — when it is:⁴

• Unsafe, adulterated, or not honestly presented
• Not from an approved source
• Ready-to-eat and possibly contaminated by an employee who was restricted or excluded — which connects this rule directly to employee illness reporting
• Contaminated by food employees, consumers or other persons through contact with hands, bodily discharges such as nasal or oral discharges, or other means

That last line is the rule behind the hardest call in what to do when someone gets hurt: food that blood or another bodily fluid reached is contaminated, and contaminated food is discarded. Not judged, not rinsed, not moved to staff meal.

It is also the rule that answers the quiet question about food a guest sent back. Once it has left your control and been in contact with a consumer, it is in the category this rule describes.

The short version

• Approved source means a supplier complying with the law that applies to what they sell. The invoice is the evidence.²
• Nothing prepared in a private home may be served. Cottage food and home bakery are exceptions for the producer, not for your kitchen.²
• Wild game may not be received for sale or service — processing a hunter’s animal for the hunter is a different thing.²⁵
• Shellstock tags: attached until empty, then filed ninety days.²
• Separate raw animal foods from ready-to-eat and from each other, by equipment, arrangement, or timing. The cook-temperature ladder is a method, not the rule.³
• Nine places food may not be stored, and the sweating pipe is the one that catches people.³
• Discard anything unsafe, unapproved, or contaminated by hands or bodily discharges.⁴

The sheet for this

A printable shellstock tag file works out the ninety-day discard date for you.