What Is a Food Control Plan? NZ Guide (Food Act 2014)

If you’re starting a food business in New Zealand, or you’ve been running one for a while and never quite got your head around the paperwork, the term “Food Control Plan” has probably come up. This guide explains what it is, who needs one, and what it actually involves day to day.

The Short Answer

A Food Control Plan (FCP) is a written document that describes the food safety procedures your business follows. It covers how you receive, store, prepare, cook, and serve food safely. It also sets out what you do when something goes wrong.

It’s a legal requirement under the Food Act 2014. If your food business handles higher-risk food activities (which includes most restaurants, cafes, takeaways, caterers, bakeries, and food manufacturers), you need one.

Why It Exists

Before the Food Act 2014, food safety regulation in New Zealand was fragmented. Different rules applied depending on what kind of food you made and where you sold it. The Food Act brought everything under one framework, and the Food Control Plan is the tool it uses for businesses that handle higher-risk food.

The idea is straightforward: if you write down how you keep food safe, follow those procedures, and record that you’re following them, then when a verifier visits your business, there’s a clear trail showing everything is under control.

It’s based on HACCP principles (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points). That sounds complicated, but in practice it means identifying what could go wrong in your operation (food not cooked hot enough, fridge too warm, cross-contamination) and putting procedures in place to prevent it.

Who Needs One

In short: if your business cooks, prepares, manufactures, or processes food for sale, you need an FCP. That includes restaurants, cafes, takeaways, bakeries, caterers, food trucks, butchers, food manufacturers, and more.

Lower-risk businesses, those that only sell pre-packaged food or whole produce, may operate under a simpler National Programme instead. We’ve written a detailed comparison of FCPs vs National Programmes if you’re not sure which applies to you. You can also use MPI’s online tool to check.

What’s Actually in a Food Control Plan

An FCP covers every food safety activity in your operation, from receiving deliveries through to cleaning up at the end of the day. The main areas are:

• Daily checks: Temperature monitoring, cleaning, staff hygiene
• Food handling: Receiving, storage, preparation, cooking, cooling, serving
• When things go wrong: Corrective actions and recall procedures
• Record keeping: Temperature logs, cleaning records, supplier records, staff training records, corrective action records

If you want the full breakdown of what each section involves, our template FCP guide goes through every card in detail. For a practical daily view, see our food safety checklist for restaurants.

The part most businesses struggle with isn’t the procedures. It’s keeping the daily records consistent. That’s what verifiers actually check.

What Happens if You Don’t Have One

Operating a food business without the required food safety plan is an offence under the Food Act 2014. Your local council can issue improvement notices, and in serious cases, businesses can be fined or shut down.

More practically, without a plan you have no structured approach to food safety. That means higher risk of making someone sick, no defence if something goes wrong, and no way to demonstrate to customers or business partners that your operation is safe.

Template vs Custom

Most food businesses use MPI’s template FCP. It’s designed for businesses that prepare and sell food directly to consumers, including restaurants, cafes, takeaways, bakeries, caterers, and similar operations. We’ve written a detailed guide to the template if you want to understand what’s involved.

If your operation is more complex (food manufacturing, specialist processes, export, or anything that doesn’t fit the template), you need a custom FCP. This is a plan written specifically for your operation, evaluated by an MPI-recognised evaluator before you can register it. We provide custom FCP systems for manufacturers and processors if that’s what you need.

Paper vs Digital

Traditionally, Food Control Plans have been paper-based. A folder with your plan, a stack of printed forms for daily checks, and a filing system for records. It works, but it has problems:

• Forms get lost, wet, or damaged
• Handwriting is hard to read
• Records pile up and become hard to search
• Staff forget to fill them in, then backdate them later
• Pulling together documentation for a verification visit means digging through months of paper

A digital Food Control Plan does the same thing (same checks, same procedures, same records), but your team fills everything in on a phone or tablet. Records are timestamped automatically, stored securely, and ready to export as a PDF whenever your verifier needs them.

The Template FCP App is the digital FCP platform we built for this. It’s designed specifically for New Zealand food businesses operating under the Food Act 2014. If you want to see how it works, there’s a 30-day free trial with no payment upfront.

Getting Started

If you need to set up a Food Control Plan for your business, start with our step-by-step setup guide. It walks you through choosing the right template, registering with your council, and getting your daily operations running.