How do you vet a food logistics supplier?

A food logistics questionnaire fails at the first question when it asks a provider to confirm something legally compulsory, then scores it. The floor binds the shortlist equally, and a provider presenting compliance with it as a differentiator is selling you the law.

So run two columns. One holds what the law requires of any carrier: no credit for it, only a fail if it is missing. The other holds what is voluntary and evidenced — a certificate held today, a record you can inspect, an insurance basis in writing. The second column is where a shortlist separates.

Yes, in the sense the law means it. Distribution sits inside the definition of a food business, so a carrier is a food business operator and must work to permanent procedures based on HACCP principles. What changes is the content, not the obligation.

For a carrier the hazards are shorter and more specific: time and temperature across the journey, contamination between loads, the integrity of what was handed over, and who touches it. A plan that reads like a kitchen's has been copied rather than written.

Then training, where the web is least reliable. The law names no qualification and no level: assimilated Regulation (EC) No 852/2004 requires training commensurate with the work activity, and the Food Standards Agency's position is that a certificate is not itself the requirement — evidenced competence is. So a supplier telling you its people are trained has said nothing. Ask what the award is in, since food safety and HACCP are different subjects and different certificates, ask to see one, and check the body that issued it still awards qualifications.

Put the same question here. Every driver on a Fleetable route holds Level 2 HACCP as a condition of engagement, checked at operator vetting. Fleetable's ops lead holds Level 3 HACCP and maintains the HACCP-based procedures the operation works to. Two awards for two jobs: the first covers working inside a plan, the one above it is written for the people who develop and maintain one — so a provider attributing the supervisory award to every driver is describing something worth asking to see. The awarding body belongs on the certificate rather than in a claim on a website, here as anywhere else. And neither level is required by law, because the law names none: read it as sitting above an open floor rather than as compliance with a mandate.

Liability is allocated by three things, in order: your contract, the standard conditions where it is silent, and what insurance responds to.

Where carriage runs on the Road Haulage Association's conditions of carriage, liability for goods lost, misdelivered or damaged is capped by weight rather than by value — a figure per tonne, set by the edition your contract names — with indirect or consequential loss capped at the carriage charges. Fleetable contracts on the RHA Conditions of Carriage 2026, which caps liability for the goods at £1,300 per tonne, or £1.30 a kilo. The limit can be raised, by written notice before the goods move rather than after a loss.

For food that cap is the term to read twice: chilled and prepared product is light and expensive, so a stack worth thousands sits under a cap of a few hundred. Where the value per kilo runs far above the cap, the conditions are not your remedy.

Insurance answers a different question. Goods-in-transit cover is contractual rather than statutory — yours to require, at a limit and on a basis you set, capped to the conditions or written at full value. Public liability is separate cover, for third-party injury and property damage: it does not cover the value of the load, and no such policy does. Fleetable's own £10m of it sits on that basis.

The rest is not contractual at all. The business receiving the load decides whether it is fit to use, under its own procedures, and the carrier answers for what happened in its custody. Who is liable is a question the contract in front of you answers. This is not legal advice — only the list of places to look before a break rather than after one.

A questionnaire measures a back office. It cannot tell you whether the 07:30 drop at your tightest site lands before prep starts, which is what your kitchens judge on. So finish with a parallel run: one route, alongside your current provider, on your own sites and windows, with nothing switched. You get a measured record instead of a promise, and a failure costs weeks of one route rather than a quarter of an estate.

The same answers here: Fleetable owns no vans, holds no premises and stores nothing — capacity is contracted route by route from vetted operators. No accreditation is held, and accreditations are added as contracts require them. Allergen control on a load is a contamination question for a carrier rather than a labelling one, and the separation your product needs is set with you and written into the contract. A route runs with a set driver and a named backup.