Building Food Service Standard Operating Procedures

Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) are powerful tools to assure food safety daily at your food service facility. Just like having recipes so your food tastes great each day, SOPs are a set of directions that must be followed to ensure food safety while completing tasks - tasks such as cooking chicken, cooling a food, or sanitizing a work surface. Foodservice SOPs are written practices and procedures and are the basic ingredient to producing safe food. It is essential to train employees and emphasize the importance of following the procedures.

Program Notes - Download and Installation

PC users are invited to begin writing food service SOPs today. (This program doesn't work on Mac computers.) SOP Builder is not a part of this web site. The program and all data will reside entirely on your computer. Click this link to begin downloading the SOP Builder program to your computer.

After you click the link, you will be asked to "Run" or "Save" the program somewhere on your computer depending on the web browser software you use.

If you choose to run the file, the file to be downloaded will place itself in your temp folder while it extracts itself and it will (1) create a new folder C:\SOPBuilder on your computer and (2) load that folder with new files needed to run that program and to provide you with instructions about using the program. When you have completed these actions, you may launch the new program by clicking on the file SOPBuilder.exe in the new folder (C:\SOPBuilder). The program doesn't automatically place an icon on your computer's desktop so you may want to create a shortcut.

If you choose to save the file, it will download to a folder on your computer by default or by your choice. Often, that folder will be download or temp. Be sure to observe where it is being saved because you will need to go to that folder, open it and then double click the file named SOPbuilder.exe. These actions will cause the new program to extract itself from that main file and it will (1) create a new folder C:\SOPBuilder on your computer and (2) load that folder with new files needed to run that program and to provide you with instructions about using the program. When you have completed these actions, you may launch the new program by clicking on the file SOPBuilder.exe in the new folder (C:\SOPBuilder). The program doesn't automatically place an icon on your computer's desktop so you may want to create a shortcut.

Once you have the program installed there are help files present to assist with the various program functions. There is also a Contact tab in the program so that you will be able to get further assistance when needed. By default, you will see Allegan County in a drop down list on the contact page. Click the arrow to the right hand side of that text and scroll to select your county.

Reinstalling the SOP Builder program will cause all previous SOPs you created to be lost.