Walk-in down or power out: what Utah's food code requires

The rule that decides whether you stay open

Utah's Food Service Sanitation rule, R392-100, adopts the 2022 FDA Food Code. Section 8-404.11 of the Food Code covers emergencies. When an imminent health hazard may exist, the permit holder has to stop operating right away and notify the health department. The Food Code lists an extended interruption of electrical service among the examples, alongside fire, flood, a sewage backup and a loss of water.

Two parts of the same section give you room. You do not have to close an area of the establishment that the problem does not affect, so a dead reach-in on the bar line is a different situation from a building with no power. And during an extended loss of power or water, the health department may let you keep operating if you have a written emergency operating plan it has approved, you take immediate corrective action, and you tell the department when you put the plan into effect.

That last exception is the reason to write a plan now. It only helps an operator who has one before the power goes out.

How Salt Lake County treats it

Salt Lake County's own brochure on reinstating a suspended food service permit lists no electricity and no water among the imminent health hazards that lead to a suspension. A Health Department spokesman told KSL in 2018 that the county suspends around 50 permits a year, and named lack of refrigeration as an example of a single problem serious enough to cause one. Holding food above 41°F was also one of the three most common critical violations.

The brochure is blunt about one point. If an inspector tells you to stop operating and you keep going, that can be a class B misdemeanor.

When one unit fails on an ordinary day

Most failures are a single walk-in or prep table that stops holding temperature while the power stays on. The kitchen keeps running, but every piece of TCS food in that unit is now a question.

Start with the food, then the equipment:

• Probe the product. Cold holding is 41°F or below, measured in the food. A wall thermometer reading tells you about the air.
• Move what is still at 41°F or below into units that are holding, and write down the time and temperature of each item as you move it.
• Separate anything above 41°F and do not serve it until you know how long it was warm. If you cannot establish that, plan to discard it.
• Keep the failed unit closed while you wait for service. Every opening lets warm air in.
• Log the unit's temperature once it is repaired, until it has held 41°F or below for a full cycle with product in it.

Salt Lake County's reinstatement brochure uses failing refrigerators as its worked example. The corrective plan it describes has staff check and record the temperature of every cold holding unit before opening and every four hours until closing, with a manager verifying the logs daily. Food found above 41°F is moved or discarded depending on how long it was out of temperature. That is a reasonable standard to adopt before an inspector asks for it.

If the unit is the problem, our walk-in troubleshooting guide covers the checks worth doing before a technician arrives.

What you can keep and what has to go

This is where most of the money is lost, and where a plan written in advance changes the answer.

• Refrigerated TCS food. The Conference for Food Protection's Emergency Action Plan for Retail Food Establishments includes a time and temperature chart for food that warms above 41°F during an outage. Food handled within the chart's limits can be treated as if the outage never happened. The plan only allows the chart for an operator with a written plan prepared in advance and temperatures monitored under it. Without that, food that may have gone above 41°F should be discarded.
• Time as a public health control. Food Code section 3-501.19 lets food sit without temperature control for up to four hours, but it requires written procedures prepared in advance, starting temperatures, and containers marked with a discard time. It cannot be applied after the fact to food that sat in a dead walk-in.
• Hot food. Under the same emergency plan, if power comes back within two hours, hot food can be rapidly reheated to 165°F within two more hours. If power is not back within two hours, discard it within four hours of the outage unless it has been kept at 135°F or above.
• Frozen food. Food that is still solid or partly frozen, with no sign of package damage, can generally be refrozen. TCS food that has thawed but stayed at 41°F or below on the outside, with a frozen core, can be refrozen or cooked.
• Ice. Ice counts as food. After an outage, the emergency plan has you clean and sanitize the ice machine, along with other equipment and food contact surfaces, before you use it again.

The county's brochure and the Food Code both leave the final call to the health department. If you are unsure about a product, call the Food Protection Bureau before you serve it.

Getting reopened in Salt Lake County

Food Code section 8-404.12 requires approval from the health department before you resume operations that were stopped under 8-404.11. In Salt Lake County, a suspended permit comes back through the Food Protection Bureau, and its brochure sets out the steps:

• Stop operating as the inspector directs.
• Correct every violation on the inspection report.
• Call the Food Protection Bureau at 385-468-3845 to schedule an enforcement meeting.
• Submit a written corrective action plan, ideally by email before the meeting.
• Attend the enforcement meeting. The county cannot reinstate the permit until you or your representative do.
• Pass the inspector's follow-up inspection.

After a power outage, plan to show the inspector that power and water are back, that every cold holding unit is at 41°F or below with product in it, that the ice machine and food contact surfaces have been cleaned and sanitized, and what you kept or threw out, with times and temperatures. The Food Protection Bureau's office hours are 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday.

Write the plan before you need it

Both of the rules that let an operator keep food or keep serving during an outage depend on something written beforehand: the approved emergency operating plan in 8-404.11, and the advance plan the Conference for Food Protection chart requires. A short plan kept with the temperature logs covers most of it:

• Who decides. The person in charge on each shift, and who they call first.
• How you measure. A calibrated probe thermometer that does not need power, and a log sheet for times and temperatures.
• How you hold cold. Where you can get ice or dry ice quickly, and which units get it first.
• What stays powered. If you have a generator, which circuits it carries.
• Who fixes it. A refrigeration contractor who answers after hours, with the number written on the plan.

If you write a plan you want the county to approve under 8-404.11, call the Food Protection Bureau and ask how it reviews one. For equipment failures that cannot wait until morning, see our emergency refrigeration service page.