Why Your HACCP Plan Shouldn't Cost £3,000

The £3,000 question

If you're a small food producer in the UK — a bakery, a dairy, a craft brewery, a food-to-go kitchen — you already know the compliance landscape is stacked against you.

You need a HACCP plan. Your auditor expects it. Your retailers demand it. SALSA won't certify you without one. And the standard way to get one? Pay a food safety consultant somewhere between £2,000 and £5,000.

For a business with 5 employees and tight margins, that's not a minor expense. It's a significant chunk of capital that could go toward equipment, ingredients, or simply keeping the lights on.

The consultant model is broken for small producers

Let's be clear: food safety consultants do valuable work. The good ones bring decades of experience and deep regulatory knowledge. But the traditional model — weeks of back-and-forth, site visits, document drafts, revisions — was designed for larger operations that can absorb the cost.

For a small producer making sourdough in a shared kitchen or bottling hot sauce in a converted garage, the same methodology applies but the economics don't scale down. You still need the full 12-step Codex Alimentarius methodology. You still need hazard analysis tables, CCP control charts, and prerequisite programmes. The complexity is the same. The budget isn't.

What if the methodology was the constant, but the delivery changed?

This is the question we asked when we built Sage, FoodSafe's AI food safety expert.

The food safety methodology is well-established. The Codex Alimentarius framework has been the global standard for decades. The hazards are known. The decision trees are documented. The risk scoring matrices are mathematical.

What if, instead of paying someone to walk you through that methodology over weeks of consultation, you could have a conversation with an AI that knows the methodology inside out — and have your plan built in hours?

How Sage works

Sage isn't a chatbot. It's not generating your plan from templates or cross-referencing other businesses' data. It's walking you through the actual 12-step HACCP methodology, asking the questions a good consultant would ask, and applying deterministic food safety logic to your specific answers.

Tell Sage what you make, how you make it, and where. It asks follow-up questions about your ingredients, your processes, your environment, your team. As you talk, it builds your plan — product descriptions, process flows, hazard analysis, CCP determination, control charts, the lot.

The AI guides the conversation. The food safety logic makes the decisions. And at the end, you get a professional PDF formatted exactly how auditors expect it.

The result

A HACCP plan that's genuinely yours — built from your products, your processes, your specific hazards. Not a template with your name pasted on top. Not a generic document that sort of fits your business. A real plan, built through a real conversation, ready for a real audit.

From £39.95/month. Not £3,000 once.

And unlike a consultant's plan, you can update it anytime your business changes. New product? New process? New kitchen? Talk to Sage again. Your plan evolves with your business.

The bottom line

Food safety compliance shouldn't be a luxury that only well-funded producers can afford. Every small food business deserves access to the same methodology, the same rigour, and the same audit-ready documentation — without the consultant price tag.

That's why we built FoodSafe. That's why we built Sage.

Records kept. Standards kept. Compliance, kept.