Food-safe standards, to your spec.
Fleetable runs food-safe vehicles, checked before each job — chilled, frozen or ambient as the load needs — with drivers checked to your standard and temperature logged and proof of delivery at every drop. Where a contract requires a formal accreditation, it is put in place for that contract — and never named or claimed before it is held.
Drivers checked to your standard. Chilled, food-safe vehicles. Proof at every drop.
Accreditations added as contracts require.
The problem
Goods-in rejects the record, not the driver.
A chilled delivery is accepted or refused on its paperwork. Your goods-in team checks the temperature record before anyone signs, and a missing or broken log turns the load away — the food can be perfectly cold and it still goes back on the van.
The same question arrives again in procurement, wearing a different suit: who drives the route, what vehicle is it, and what evidence comes back afterwards. This page answers both. It names what Fleetable does not hold as plainly as what it does.
The chain
Five things happen on every drop.
None of them is optional, and each one leaves a record you can ask for.
- The vehicle is checked before the job. Food-safe and chilled, checked at the start of the run — not against a schedule that may have lapsed a fortnight ago.
- The class is matched to the load. Six classes are priced and dispatched: bike or moped, car, small van, long van, Luton and 7.5t lorry. The class is chosen for the drop size and for the temperature the load has to hold, not for whatever happened to be free.
- Temperature is logged at every drop. At each one — not at the depot, and not only at the first stop.
- Proof of delivery is captured at every drop. Time, place and signature, recorded against the drop rather than the run.
- The record is handed over at signature. Your goods-in team gets it when they sign, and it stays available afterwards, so a disputed box can be checked rather than argued.
Accountability
Who actually drives your route.
Fleetable owns no vans. That is deliberate, and it is worth saying first, because it is the first thing a procurement team should ask.
Routes are run by vetted operators working to Fleetable’s contract. Every route has a set driver and a named backup — the same person each week, and a second who already knows the run for the weeks the first cannot make it. Continuity is a food-safety property as much as a service one: a driver who has done your round knows which door, which fridge, and which site will not sign without the log.
The standard those operators work to, and how an operator applies to run routes, is set out for them on driving for Fleetable.
Drivers are checked to your standard. You set the check your contract requires, Fleetable applies it to the people on your route, and you get evidence that it was applied. Whoever is behind the wheel, one named contact at Fleetable stays accountable for the route. You do not chase a subcontractor.
Just in time
Accreditations added as contracts require.
Fleetable names no accreditation it does not hold. Where the trust row above is empty, it says so rather than filling the space.
That is a model, not a gap being hidden. A formal accreditation carries an audit, a fee and an annual renewal. Carrying a set of them speculatively is a fixed cost, and fixed costs reach every rate — including the rates of clients whose contract never asked for the certificate. Fleetable takes the cost on when a signed contract needs it.
So if your tender names an accreditation, bring it to the capacity review. You get a written answer: what is held on the day you ask, what would be put in place for your contract, and how long that takes. If the timeline does not fit your tender, you will hear that as well.
What will not happen is an accreditation appearing on this page because it reads well.
Honesty
What Fleetable does not claim.
Four things this site deliberately does not say.
- No owned fleet. Capacity is contracted, not parked. Nothing is billed for a standing asset.
- No accreditation before it is held. Covered above, and it is the reason the trust row is short.
- No unaudited figure presented as fact. On-time-in-full and volume figures anywhere on this site are labelled as samples until they come from an audited report. When they are audited the label goes and the figures change everywhere in one pass.
- No autonomy the software does not have. The platform is dispatch, early-warning routing, live tracking and reporting. People make the calls it surfaces.
Evidence
Prove it on one route, before you commit.
You do not have to take any of this on a web page. Take one route.
Fleetable runs a single route of yours alongside whatever you use now. Nothing switches, nothing is cancelled, and your current provider keeps the rest. At the end you hold the thing that settles it: the temperature record and proof of delivery for every drop on that route, the on-time-in-full figure for it, and the per-mile cost with every line shown.
That is a compliance file on your own route, produced before a contract exists. If it does not hold up, you have lost one route’s worth of nothing.
Reporting
The trail your quality and finance teams get.
Every drop carries its time, its temperature and its proof of delivery, and the reporting sits on top of those records rather than beside them. On-time-in-full is reported per route and per site with the drops behind it visible, so the figure can be checked rather than taken on trust.
Finance reads the same trail against the per-mile rate — mileage, loading, the return leg and any surcharge, each shown as its own line. A month’s invoice reconciles to the drops that produced it.
Data
What happens to the information you send.
Route data and contact details you send are held in Fleetable’s own systems and reachable only by named administrators. They are not passed to a third-party form processor. What is collected, why it is kept and how to have it removed is set out in the privacy notice.
The law
What the regulations require of any food carrier.
Before any certificate is discussed, there is a floor. These are third-party rules rather than Fleetable promises, and they apply to every provider you are considering.
- A logistics business is a food business
- Regulation (EC) No 178/2002 defines a food business as an undertaking carrying out activities at any stage of production, processing and distribution of food. Distribution is named. That brings the carrier inside the same framework as the kitchen it collects from, including the requirement in Regulation (EC) No 852/2004 to work to procedures based on HACCP principles.
- The vehicle
- Regulation (EC) No 852/2004 — retained after exit and now termed assimilated law — carries the transport rules: conveyances and containers kept clean and in good repair, food protected from contamination, and where necessary able to hold appropriate temperatures and to have them monitored. In England it is enforced through the Food Safety and Hygiene (England) Regulations 2013.
- Chilled — there is no single blanket figure
- This is the question most often answered wrongly. The general duty is that food likely to support the growth of pathogens is not kept at a temperature that risks health, and that the cold chain is not interrupted. On top of that, the Food Safety and Hygiene (England) Regulations 2013 make it an offence to keep such food above 8°C, subject to exemptions — and premises there includes a vehicle. Products of animal origin under Regulation (EC) No 853/2004 carry their own, lower figures. Industry practice runs colder than 8°C precisely so that door openings and load transfer never breach it.
- Frozen
- The Quick-frozen Foodstuffs (England) Regulations 2007 require quick-frozen foodstuffs to be held at −18°C or colder, with a permitted tolerance no warmer than −15°C during transport, including local distribution. Note the category: the rule attaches to quick-frozen foodstuffs as legally defined, not to everything a kitchen calls frozen.
- The people
- Regulation (EC) No 852/2004 requires food handlers to be supervised and instructed or trained in food hygiene matters commensurate with their work activity. It names no qualification and no level. The Food Standards Agency's position is that a food hygiene certificate is not itself a legal requirement — what is required is competence that can be evidenced. Level 2 is an industry norm, not a statutory one.
None of that is an accreditation, and none of it is a differentiator. It is the floor, and it binds every provider on your shortlist equally. A provider presenting compliance with it as a reason to choose them is selling you the law.
Alongside those rules the Food Standards Agency (FSA) publishes guidance — on chilled storage, and on what to do when food has travelled over temperature. FSA food transport guidance describes what good practice looks like; the regulations above are what is enforceable. Read the guidance next to a provider's answer rather than instead of it, and treat a provider who cites guidance as though it were law the same way you would treat one who cites law as though it were a feature.
The certificates
BRCGS and SALSA, and what they actually cover.
Two schemes come up by name in food tenders. Both are worth understanding before you require one, because a standard asked for out of habit can rule out a provider who would have run your route well.
- BRCGS Storage and Distribution
- A third-party-certified product-safety standard, benchmarked by the Global Food Safety Initiative, currently at Issue 4. It covers the distribution chain — storage, distribution and transport by road, rail, air or ship — and a site can certify to a narrower scope, including transport only. One distinction inside it is worth knowing when you assess any asset-light provider: the standard separates vehicles and staff a certified company directly manages, which may still be contracted in, from a subcontracting arrangement where the third party manages the service itself. That distinction, not the asset-light model as such, is what the scope turns on.
- SALSA
- Safe and Local Supplier Approval, a UK scheme for small and micro food and drink businesses working from commercial premises. Its main standard is a production standard aimed at producers and packers, so it is not a logistics standard. A separate Brokers, Storage and Distribution standard covers small businesses that place products on the market which they have acquired or taken title to but have not made.
Fleetable holds neither, and holds no other accreditation. That is stated here rather than left to be noticed, because a compliance page that describes a standard without saying whether the company holds it is doing something dishonest with the reader's attention.
What this page will not do is tell you which scheme Fleetable would qualify for. The scope wording above is published by the schemes; applying it to a particular operating model produces an opinion, and an opinion about your own eligibility is not evidence. If your tender names a standard, name it at the capacity review and you get a written answer on what is held, what would be put in place for the contract and how long it takes — from the scheme's position rather than from ours.
The reasoning behind holding none of them yet — and why that is a model rather than a gap — is set out above. If what you need first is what these standards actually cover rather than what Fleetable holds, that is answered in the guide to vetting a food logistics supplier. The wider version of the question, applied to any provider rather than to Fleetable, is on how to choose a provider.
The people
What the people handling your load are trained to.
Every driver holds Level 2 HACCP as a condition of engagement, checked at operator vetting rather than taken on trust. Fleetable's ops lead holds Level 3 HACCP and maintains the HACCP-based procedures the operation works to.
Those are two qualifications for two different jobs, and the split is worth stating because it is routinely blurred. The level a food handler takes covers working to a HACCP plan. The level above it is written for the people who develop and maintain one. A provider telling you every driver holds the supervisory qualification is describing something unusual, and it is worth asking to see.
Note what this is not. It is not an accreditation, and it is not compliance with a mandate: the hygiene regulation requires training commensurate with the work and names no qualification and no level, and the Food Standards Agency's position is that a certificate is not itself the legal requirement. A named qualification across every driver sits above that floor rather than meeting it. It is also HACCP rather than food safety — separate awards with separate syllabuses, and a provider that says one when it means the other has told you less than it thinks.
What a driver is trained to is a floor, not the whole answer. The standard actually promised is your standard — set against what your contract requires, and described on how a route is set up.
Insurance
What to require, and what the default actually covers.
This is the part of a food logistics tender most often left to a tick box, and it is the one that decides what you recover when a load is lost.
- Goods in transit is not required by law
- Motor insurance covering carriage for hire and reward is, and employers' liability is where there are employees. Goods-in-transit cover is contractual — which means it is yours to require, and it is one of the few things in a tender that is entirely within your control.
- The default is a weight-based cap, not the value of your load
- Under the Road Haulage Association's conditions of carriage — Fleetable contracts on the RHA Conditions of Carriage 2026, and the edition your own contract names is the one that binds you — a carrier's liability for goods lost or damaged is capped at £1,300 per tonne. Chilled and prepared food is light and expensive, so a pallet worth several thousand pounds can sit under a cap of a few hundred. The cap can be raised, but only by written notice before the goods move.
- The question to ask
- Whether cover is limited to those conditions or written as all risks at the full value of the goods, what the limit is per vehicle, and who responds when the load is on a subcontractor's vehicle rather than the contracting carrier's. Ask for the certificate and the limit in writing, and ask it of every provider on the shortlist rather than only the asset-light one.
Fleetable carries £10m public liability, and the cover answers for work performed by the operators it subcontracts rather than only for its own people. For an asset-light provider that second half is the half that matters: a limit stopping at the contracting company would be a figure about nobody who will ever be on your site.
Now the part you are usually left to assume. Public liability answers for injury to a third party and for damage to third-party property. It does not cover the value of your load. No public liability policy does — goods in transit is a separate cover, and the two are routinely sold together on one policy, which is exactly why the assumption is so easy to make. If a vehicle carrying your stock is destroyed, the figure above pays nothing towards the stock.
What answers for the load is the carriage position: Fleetable's own goods-in-transit cover, extending to its subcontracted operators, under the RHA Conditions of Carriage 2026 with liability capped at £1,300 per tonne. The sum insured behind it is not published, because the cap rather than the policy size is what you can act on — and the cap can be raised by written notice before the goods move, which is the lever worth knowing about.
Due diligence
What to collect before you sign with anyone.
Allergens: what a carrier can actually control.
Loads travel sealed and as packed. Nothing is opened, repacked or decanted in transit, so the allergen status of what you handed over is the allergen status of what arrives. That is the whole of the claim, and it is deliberately the whole of it.
The reason to state it that narrowly is that allergen duty splits in two, and only one half can ever sit with a carrier. Declaring and labelling allergens — including the pre-packed-for-direct-sale labelling added by the 2019 amendment to the food information rules — is the duty of the business under whose name the food is marketed. A carrier cannot discharge that, cannot verify it, and should not imply it takes it on. What a carrier owes you is the other half: the load placed and protected so that what you packed is what your site receives.
If your own HACCP plan sets a requirement beyond that — a load that cannot share a vehicle, a cleaning step between drops — bring it to the capacity review and it goes into the contract against your specification rather than against a paragraph we wrote in advance. A sealed case and an open tray are not the same problem, and a blanket policy published on a website would have been written for whichever one the writer had in mind.
The file a buyer should be able to build.
Seven things, from any provider, before a contract exists. Ask Fleetable for the same seven and hold the answers to the same standard.
- Registration with the local authority as a food business, and who registered.
- The HACCP-based procedures the operation works to, and who wrote them.
- What temperature the load is held at, how it is recorded, and how long the record is kept.
- Which certificate is held today — with the certificate, not the claim — and which is not.
- The insurance certificate, the limit, and whether it is weight-capped or full-value.
- What training the people handling the food have, and the evidence that it was delivered.
- One week of real records from a route the provider already runs, with the client's name removed.
The last one is the only item on the list a provider cannot produce from a brochure, which is why it is worth more than the other six put together. Fleetable’s version of it is a route run in parallel with your current provider — described on how the switch works. The long-form version of this checklist, written for the person who has to build the supplier file rather than sign it off, is in the Fleetable journal.
Related
Where to next
FAQ
Questions, answered.
Which accreditations does Fleetable hold?
Who actually drives my route?
What record does goods-in get?
Can you meet the accreditation requirement in our tender?
How do we check the standard before signing anything?
What happens when a drop is disputed?
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