Your 3 Must-have Food Truck Inspection Checklists

What Is a Food Truck Inspection Checklist?

Getting mandatory food truck permits and complying with regulations is a big task. Food truck inspection checklists help food truck owners ensure that operations are in compliance with established standards for food safety and sanitation, storage, housekeeping, and maintenance. Performing regular checks with a food truck inspection checklist helps you and your team pass unannounced health inspections, keeps your business up and running, and keeps it running at full capacity. Arguably most importantly, though, your conscientiousness keeps your customers safe from health risks due to foodborne illness.

This article deals with:

1. Benefits of a food truck inspection checklist

2. 3 must-have food truck inspection checklists

3. Create a regular food truck inspection with digital checklists

Advantages of a Food Truck Inpection Checklist

Regular checks are crucial in any food truck. Yet many operators and employees still choose to go through them quickly and inefficiently in order to "get them over with". One effective way to move away from this mindset is to use food truck inspection checklists. Here are five reasons why:

1. Checklists enable easier audits
   Food truck inspection checklists make it much easier to verify compliance with the HACCP plan and guidelines. This way, staff know what kind of corrective actions they need to take to address potential problems. Without checklists, staff usually spend more time conducting audits and inspections, but find fewer problems that need to be fixed.
2. More important tasks are less likely to be neglected
   Regular audits and inspections are inherently boring because they are designed to ensure that every aspect of a particular facility or process is properly inspected. However, people can get sloppy with repetitive tasks - for example, skipping important points and steps in safety audits because inspectors have become so accustomed to their regular process that they easily digress. Food truck inspection checklists keep them on their toes.
3. Food truck inspection checklists keep staff organised
   Well-designed food truck inspection checklists follow specific food handling and sales regulations that must be followed. This structure helps staff stay organized when conducting checks and with their scheduling.
4. Checklists increase a sense of responsibility
   Using food truck inspection checklists means that there is always a record of what actions have been taken. This gives staff a greater sense of accountability than if there was no way to prove negligent audits.
5. Food truck inspection checklists provide a sense of security
   Because checklists are powerful tools for ensuring that audits and reviews are conducted thoroughly, most staff who conduct them will have a sense of security. This confidence usually leads to higher employee satisfaction, which in turn usually leads to higher productivity.

Three Essential Food Truck Inspection Checklists

Working in the food and hospitality industry requires compliance with regulations set by local authorities. For food trucks, regulations for vehicles are added. Maintenance appointments, breakdowns or failures are part of the daily routine of a food truck operator. In addition, it is a particular challenge to comply with all hygiene and health regulations in the "premises" of a truck. To avoid violations, the following food truck inspection checklists should not be missing in any food truck:

1. Daily Food Truck Inspection Checklist
   Daily checks are conducted by staff to minimize potential food safety risks. It also ensures that staff perform all tasks according to the set standards. One of the areas of focus is therefore whether staff are practising appropriate personal and workplace hygiene.


2. Food Truck Health Inspection Checklist
   No food goes over the food truck counter without an inspection and subsequent approval from officials. To prepare for the inspection, food truck owners can carry out the inspection themselves. The following points are usually checked:
• Cleanliness
• Proper labelling and storage of food
• Preparation of food
• Ventilation and running water
• Equipment and emergency safety
• Conduct of staff
• Necessary paperwork and permits for food trucks


3. Maintenance Food Truck Inspection Checklist
   Without a well-maintained food truck, the business cannot open. A quick check should be carried out daily before operations begin. Key items that should be checked include flat tires, dents, and cracks in the windows. In addition, tools and materials should always be carried to fix problems in a breakdown, including extra tires, tire levers, jumper cables, and an extra fuel can.

Create Digital Food truck Inspection Checklists

Performing checks every day to comply with food truck regulations is costly and time-consuming. Lumiform, the powerful audit and inspection app, allows you to conduct food truck audits anytime, anywhere using your smartphone or tablet. Lumiform's food safety and quality software helps you standardise checks by conducting audits and inspections that provide accurate and comprehensive results.

Digital food truck inspection checklists make it easy for you to prove that potential food safety risk factors are considered in all manufacturing processes. A digital tool like Lumiform helps you improve disruptive workflows by replacing paper forms, spreadsheets, scanning, and faxing with a digital app and software - online or offline. Mobile technology helps you to:

• Through the flexible form builder you can constantly optimise internal checks and processes.
• Record photographic evidence of compliant or non-compliant items and add comments as needed
• Assign and receive corrective actions immediately during an audit.
• Automatically generate comprehensive reports after an audit is completed in the food truck.
• Gain real-time transparency on processes and insights into daily food truck operations with analytics.