Mobile catering risk assessment for events

If you run a catering trailer, coffee van or street food stall, the paperwork ritual is familiar: every organiser, every council pitch, every festival wants your documents — and increasingly they want a risk assessment for their event, not the generic one you wrote three seasons ago.

The standard document pack organisers expect

• Food business registration — with your home local authority (free, required at least 28 days before you start trading; there's no certificate as such, so a confirmation letter or your registration details usually serve).
• Food hygiene rating and the issuing authority.
• Public liability insurance — organisers commonly ask for £5 million; some sites want £10 million. Check the expiry date covers the event.
• Employers' liability insurance if anyone works with you.
• Gas safety record for LPG installations, from an engineer registered for catering/LPG work, renewed annually.
• Electrical records — appliance testing (PAT) for everything that plugs in, and details of your power needs.
• Your risk assessment — covering the unit generally, and ideally the specific event.
• Depending on the event: allergen matrix, food safety management system summary (your SFBB pack), and fire extinguisher service records.

What 'site-specific' actually means

Organisers reject generic risk assessments because the risks genuinely change with the pitch. The site-specific layer is usually only a handful of decisions:

• Position — who's beside you, what's behind you, how close the public queue is to your fryer or griddle.
• Gas storage — where cylinders sit at this site, secured how, and the changeover procedure with the public present.
• Power — your generator or their supply? Cable route, covers, and earthing arrangements.
• Vehicle movement — your arrival and departure windows and route across the site.
• Water and waste — where potable water comes from, where grey water and used oil go at this event.
• Fire response — your extinguishers and blanket, plus this event's assembly point and who you alert.

Everything else — safe food handling, cleaning schedules, manual handling, cash — carries over from your standing assessment. See our general risk assessment guide for the format.

Gas and fire: what reviewers look at hardest

Catering units concentrate the event's fire risk, and environmental health officers know it. Show clearly:

• An in-date gas safety record and a system that matches it — no unbadged cylinders or improvised hoses.
• Cylinders stored upright, outside, secured, away from ignition and the public; spares kept to a minimum.
• Ventilation for the unit and CO awareness if anything burns inside.
• Extinguishers appropriate to your risks (including a fire blanket, and the right extinguisher type for deep fat if you fry), serviced and reachable.
• A shutdown drill — gas off, power off, unit clear — everyone who works with you can perform.

Making the paperwork survivable at scale

A busy operator can attend dozens of events in a season. At twenty minutes of tailoring per event, that's days of admin — which is why the generic PDF is so tempting, and why organisers have learned to spot it. The practical fixes: keep one master file (registration, insurance, gas, PAT) that only changes when the documents renew, template the site-specific page so you're filling six fields rather than rewriting, and answer organiser packs the day they arrive — the vendors who send paperwork fast get the good pitches.

This per-event grind is exactly what EventSafetyPack is being built to remove for caterers: describe the booking, get a site-specific draft to check and sign. The same applies to inflatable operators and the rest of the recurring-vendor world. Organisers running food-heavy events should see our food festival guide for the other side of this paperwork.

Common questions

I'm registered with my home council — do I need to register everywhere I trade?

No. Food business registration is with the authority where your business is based (where the unit is kept or the food is prepared). Other councils' officers can still inspect you when you trade in their area, and event organisers can ask for whatever assurance they like — but one registration covers you nationally.

How often does the gas safety check need doing?

Annually is the standard for catering LPG installations, by an engineer whose registration covers LPG and catering appliances. Keep the record with you at events — it's the single most-requested document after insurance.

An organiser wants my risk assessment 'for their file' — what are they actually checking?

That it exists, that it's yours (not a template with someone else's trading name still in it — it happens), that it covers gas, fire and the public, and that it shows awareness of their site. A tidy two-page assessment tailored to their event answers all four at a glance.