Emergency contacts
The Emergency Contacts area of SafetyBrik is your SFBB Contacts List - the digital replacement for the back-of-the-diary contact sheet that most caterers keep next to the till. It is where you record the people you would need to phone in a hurry, and the people an Environmental Health Officer will expect to see on file.
You will find it at /safety/emergency-contacts.
Why this is in your EHO pack
The Safer Food Better Business diary (pages 83 to 84 of the FSA caterers pack) explicitly asks you to keep a list of emergency and routine contacts. The pack lists Environmental Health, pest control, plumber, electrician, and refuse collector by name, but in practice an EHO will expect to see anyone you would call when something goes wrong with food safety on site.
If a fridge fails on a Friday afternoon, the EHO wants to know that you can get hold of a refrigeration engineer without losing the stock. If a pest is sighted, they want to see who you call and how quickly. The Contacts List is the structured record that proves you can.
What you can record
Each contact has:
- Category - one of the ten standard SFBB categories (see below) or Other with a custom label.
- Applies to - either All locations or pinned to a specific site.
- Business or organisation name - the name on the door or the invoice.
- Contact name - the person you would actually ask for.
- Phone, email, address - the obvious channels.
- Notes - free text for the things that do not fit a field, like out-of-hours numbers or call-out fees.
The ten standard categories
The dropdown lists ten predefined categories so contacts group consistently in the EHO PDF report:
- Environmental Health Officer
- Pest control contractor
- Plumber
- Electrician
- Gas engineer (Gas Safe registered)
- Fire safety / extinguisher servicing
- Refuse / waste collection
- Water utility
- Landlord / property manager
- Other (with a free-text custom label)
The first nine cover the typical SFBB-named contacts plus the trades most cafes need. Other is the escape hatch for anything else - locksmith, window cleaner, alarm engineer - and prompts you for a one-line custom label so the EHO PDF reads Locksmith - City Locks rather than just Other.
If something does not fit one of the predefined categories, use Other rather than forcing it into the closest match. The custom label is what an EHO will actually see in your report, so a clear Locksmith is more useful than a confusing Plumber.
Pinning to a location
Most contacts apply to every site you run - your Environmental Health Officer is usually the local council, your gas engineer probably covers all your kitchens. Leave Applies to as All locations in those cases.
Pin a contact to a specific location when:
- A contractor only services one site.
- The local authority differs between sites (different councils have different EHO teams).
- You have a sister site whose details would be confusing if mixed in.
When you filter the list by location, you will see All locations contacts plus the contacts pinned to the site you have selected. Contacts pinned to a different site stay hidden.
CRUD and permissions
The Contacts List uses standard SafetyBrik role permissions:
| Role | View | Add | Edit | Delete |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Owner | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Admin | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Member | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Viewer | Yes | No | No | No |
Deletion is a soft delete - the row is marked inactive and disappears from the list, but the row stays in the database for audit history.
How it shows up in the EHO report
When you generate the EHO report PDF, contacts appear in their own Emergency Contacts section after the Suppliers' List. They are grouped by category in the same canonical order as the dropdown, so the EHO sees Environmental Health first and the Other entries last. Each group renders as a small table with name, contact, phone, email, address, and notes columns.
If a contact is pinned to a specific location and you have generated the report scoped to that location, only that location's contacts (plus the All-locations ones) are included. If you have generated the report at the tenant level, every active contact is included.
What it does not do
This feature is intentionally a contact register, not a CRM:
- There is no activity history on a contact (when you last called the plumber).
- There is no quote tracking or invoicing - that is what CostingBrik invoices and PulseBrik are for.
- There is no automatic two-way link to the pest-control safe method yet (planned).
If you need any of those, treat the Contacts List as the lookup directory and use the relevant Brik for the workflow.