Who is the person in charge on the night shift? Covering R638 duties when the owner is away

Your takeaway trades from 06:00 to 23:00, seven days a week, and you are on site for maybe a third of those hours. The Certificate of Acceptability has your name on it, but the chicken still gets cooked, cooled and reheated while you are at home. So who is the person in charge when the owner is not on site, and has that person been trained to carry the job?

We ask this on almost every audit of a business that trades long hours. The usual answer is a pause, then “the senior cashier, I suppose”.

The person in charge duties that run every hour you trade

R638 (the Regulations Governing General Hygiene Requirements for Food Premises, the Transport of Food and Related Matters) does not only regulate buildings. It places duties on the person in charge of the premises, and those duties apply for every hour food is handled, not just office hours. If you need a refresher on the regulation itself, our plain language guide to R638 covers the full structure.

In practice, the person in charge has to make sure that:

• food handlers are trained in food hygiene and actually follow what they were taught;
• anyone with symptoms of an illness that can be passed on through food, or with infected cuts or sores, is kept away from food;
• protective clothing is clean and worn properly;
• the premises, equipment and utensils are kept clean and in good repair;
• food is stored, cooked, cooled and held safely and protected from contamination;
• problems such as a broken fridge or no hot water are acted on, not left for the morning.

A fridge that fails at 21:00 is a person in charge problem at 21:00.

Why the CoA holder cannot be the only trained person

The Certificate of Acceptability is issued by the local authority, and R638 requires the person in charge to have their own food hygiene training. Many owners stop there. The owner did the course, the certificate is on the wall, job done.

The trouble is that a certificate does not supervise anything. On a night shift the decisions that matter are made by whoever is standing in the kitchen: whether to bin the rice that sat out, whether to send home the cook who was vomiting last night, whether to keep trading when the geyser has burst. If that person has never been taught why these things matter, they will make the decision that keeps the tills running.

We see three patterns on audits:

• the owner is trained, nobody else is, and the records stop when the owner leaves;
• a manager was trained years ago and has since resigned, so the training walked out of the door with them;
• a shift lead is trained but has no authority to stop a process or send someone home, so they do not.

Choosing the person in charge when the owner is not on site

Every shift needs one named person who is in charge. Not “the team”, not “whoever is senior”. One name, on the roster, known to every staff member working that shift.

When you pick that person, look for:

• Presence. They are on site for the whole shift, not running between two branches.
• Respect. Staff already listen to them.
• Literacy for the records. They can read a temperature log and write a clear corrective action.

Then give them authority that matches the duty. Put it in writing, in a short letter of appointment or in the job description. As a minimum, the shift lead should be able to:

1. stop a process or take a dish off the menu;
2. hold or throw away food that is unsafe, without asking permission first;
3. send a sick food handler home or move them away from food;
4. call a contractor for an urgent repair up to an agreed amount;
5. close the kitchen if there is no water, no power for refrigeration or a pest problem in a food area, and phone you straight after.

A shift lead who has to phone the owner before throwing away R400 of chicken will, at 22:30 on a Friday, simply serve it.

Shift handover: the checks and the record

Most missed checks happen at handover. The day shift assumes the night shift will do the closing temperatures; the night shift assumes they were done. A two minute handover with a short written record closes that gap.

Keep the handover sheet to one page. A simple layout:

Item	Outgoing shift records	Incoming shift records
Fridge and freezer temperatures	Checked this shift, anything out of range	Time of next check
Food cooling or on hot hold	What, where and since when	Who will check it
Equipment faults	What failed and who was called	Follow up needed
Staff moved off food or sent home	Name and reason	Cover arranged
Cleaning not finished	Which area	When it will be done
Signatures	Outgoing person in charge	Incoming person in charge

The two signatures matter. They show the EHP, and your own auditor, that responsibility was handed over and accepted, not just assumed.

A worked example. A 24 hour convenience store in Gauteng with a hot food counter had good daytime records and nothing after 18:00. When we looked, the pies were sitting in a warmer that had not been checked for four nights, and a batch of chicken mayo was being made at 02:00 for the breakfast rush with no record at all. The fix was not complicated: a named night lead, a handover at 18:00 and 06:00, and two warmer checks a night. Within a month the night shift’s records were better than the day shift’s, because someone owned them.

How many people to train, and to what level

There is no magic number, so work it out from your roster rather than guessing. Count the shifts in a normal week, then ask: on every one of those shifts, is there a person on site who has completed person in charge level training? Then add cover for leave, sick days and resignations.

A practical rule we use:

• Owner or general manager: person in charge training, because the CoA and the overall system sit with them.
• Every shift lead, supervisor or duty manager who runs a shift without the owner: person in charge training.
• At least one extra person per site trained to the same level, so leave and resignations do not leave a shift uncovered.
• All food handlers: food hygiene training at food handler level, which the person in charge must ensure under R638.

For a restaurant open for lunch and dinner seven days a week, that usually means three or four people at person in charge level, not one. Our online R638 training for persons in charge is SAATCA registered and HPCSA CPD accredited, and because it runs online, shift leads can complete it between shifts instead of everyone being away on the same day.

Keep a simple training matrix: names down the side, training levels across the top, completion and refresher dates filled in. When someone resigns, the matrix shows the gap the same day.

When the EHP arrives and no one is in charge

Environmental Health Practitioners (EHPs) can arrive outside office hours, including evenings and weekends, particularly after a complaint. The first question is usually “who is in charge?” What happens next depends on the answer.

If nobody can answer, or the answer is a cashier who does not know where the records are kept, the EHP sees a business with no control outside office hours. Expect questions such as:

• Who is responsible for the premises right now, and can they show me their training?
• Where are today’s temperature records?
• Who do you call if the cold room fails tonight?
• Where is the cleaning schedule, and was tonight’s cleaning signed for?

A trained shift lead with a handover sheet, a current training record and a phone list on the wall can answer all of these in five minutes. That is often the difference between a short visit with a few notes and a compliance notice on your desk on Monday.

Brief your shift leads: greet the EHP, ask for identification, walk with them, answer honestly, note what is raised and phone the owner afterwards. Never argue or hide records.

What to do this week

• Print next week’s roster and write one person in charge name against every shift.
• Check that each of those people has person in charge level training, and book the gaps.
• Write a short letter of appointment for each shift lead stating what they may stop, hold, discard and close.
• Put a one page handover sheet at the pass or office door and use it at every change of shift.
• Pin up an emergency phone list: owner, refrigeration technician, plumber, electrician and pest control.
• Start a training matrix and diarise refresher dates.