Every FSSAI licence is granted on a promise most operators never read: compliance with Schedule 4 of the FSS (Licensing and Registration) Regulations — the rulebook of hygienic and sanitary practices. It is what inspectors carry in their heads when they walk your premises, what food safety audits score, and what turns a routine inspection into an improvement notice. Here is Schedule 4 decoded into the standards your unit must actually meet.
The structure: five parts by business type
- Part I: petty food businesses and street vendors — basic sanitary practices
- Part II: manufacturing, processing, packing, storage and distribution units — the big one
- Part III: milk and milk products
- Part IV: slaughtering and meat processing
- Part V: catering and food service establishments — restaurants, canteens, cloud kitchens
Find your part; that is your compliance contract. Restaurants live in Part V, packaged-food makers in Part II — and units doing both answer to both.
Premises and layout expectations
Schedule 4 thinks like a process engineer: unidirectional flow from raw to cooked to packed (no crossing paths that invite contamination); separate areas or times for raw and cooked handling; washable, non-absorbent surfaces — walls to a height, coved floor junctions, ceilings that shed no flakes; screened openings, air curtains or equivalent pest exclusion; potable water for food contact (with periodic testing — the water report inspectors always ask for); adequate lighting with shatter protection over food zones; and drainage that flows away from clean areas with trapped, cleanable drains. Renovating a kitchen or factory without this checklist is how good money buys non-compliance.
Personal hygiene: the human clauses
- Health: annual medical fitness certificates for food handlers (the Form on record per handler), no working with open wounds or communicable illness
- Habits: clean aprons/uniforms, head covers, no jewellery on hands, no smoking/spitting/eating in food zones
- Handwashing: stations with soap at entry to food areas — inspectors watch whether they're actually wet
- Training: documented food-safety training (FoSTaC certification for supervisors is the recognised route)
Water test report (potability, within validity), medical fitness certificates, pest-control service records, cleaning schedules signed daily, temperature logs for cold storage, and raw-material purchase records with licensed suppliers. Six files — have them ready and half the inspection is already passed.
Operations: temperatures, storage, traceability
The operational clauses set the daily disciplines: cold chain integrity (chilled ≤5°C, frozen ≤−18°C, hot holding ≥60°C as applicable — with logs); FIFO stock rotation and labelled, dated storage; raw materials only from licensed/registered suppliers with records that make one-step-back traceability possible; food-grade packaging; segregated, covered waste with daily disposal; and calibrated measuring equipment. Part II adds process controls for manufacturers — batch records, product testing periodicity through NABL/FSSAI-notified labs, and recall readiness.
From compliance to audit-proof
FSSAI's regime increasingly runs on scheduled inspections and third-party audits scored against exactly these clauses (the inspection checklists are public — download the one for your kind of business and self-score quarterly). The operators who do well institutionalise: a sanitation SOP with signed daily checklists, a pest-control contract with quarterly service records, an annual water test, staff medicals each April, and one person owning the six files. That is genuinely the whole distance between anxious inspections and boring ones.
How Aidwish helps
Aidwish runs Schedule 4 gap assessments on premises — layout review at design stage, the records system, staff training coordination and mock inspections — so food businesses pass their audits by construction, not by luck.