Every guide to cleaning standards you can find online was written by someone selling cleaning products. That is not a conspiracy, it is just who has the commercial reason to publish. It does mean the figures that get repeated are the flattering ones.
We publish the Food Standards Agency's inspection data for every rated venue in the country. We do not sell sanitiser, we do not sell vacuums, and we have no supplier relationships in this category. That is the only reason this section can tell you which number on a datasheet is the one that actually applies in your kitchen.
Standards
What the BS EN numbers on a bottle mean, what each test actually measures, and where each one applies.
BS EN 1276 explained: what the standard actually tests
The same sanitiser can pass in thirty seconds or five minutes. What decides which figure applies to your surfaces.
BS EN 13697: surface testing without mechanical action
Why a surface test is harder to pass than a suspension test, and why dual certification is stronger evidence. In progress.
Which standard applies where in a food business
EN 1276, EN 13697, EN 14476 and EN 1499 mapped to surfaces, hands and areas. In progress.
How we score products
Comparison tables in this section are scored out of 100 on a published method. Certification coverage carries 40 points, contact time 25, cost per litre at working dilution 20, and practical fit 15.
Two things about that split matter more than the numbers themselves. Contact time is scored on the dirty-conditions result, because a working kitchen surface is a dirty-conditions surface and the clean-conditions figure describes a bench that has already been cleaned. And certification plus contact time together account for 65 percent of every score, which is a deliberate choice: no commercial arrangement can move either of them.
We will sell advertising in this section and some links will earn a commission. We will not sell a ranking, a score or a verdict, and any paid placement will say so on the page.
Where the figures come from
Every certification, dilution and contact time we publish is read from the manufacturer's own product information sheet, not from a retailer's product page. Retailer copy is written to sell and tends to quote the fastest number available.
We record which document revision a figure came from, because manufacturers publish multiple versions of the same sheet over the years and the reported results are not always identical between them. Where a datasheet is silent on a certification, we record it as not stated rather than as a fail. Silence means the product has not been shown to meet that standard under those conditions, which is not the same thing as failing it.
The ratings data behind this
This section exists because of the inspection data we already publish. If you want the ratings rather than the standards, start with recent downgrades, which lists venues currently rated 0, 1 or 2 by their local authority, or inspected this week for the newest results in the FSA feed.
Food hygiene rating data is Crown copyright, supplied by the Food Standards Agency under the Open Government Licence v3.0. FindMyHygiene is an independent publisher and is not affiliated with the Food Standards Agency or any UK local authority.