Deleting your account and your data
You can do this yourself, in the app, without asking us. It takes about
a minute. Your account closes immediately and is deleted after 30 days. The
instructions below are for the app
called Good Food Hygiene (com.goodfoodhygiene.gfh), and for
the same service used in a browser at app.goodfoodhygiene.co.uk.
1. Deleting your account from inside the app
- Open the app and sign in as the account owner.
- Go to My Account.
- Choose Close account.
- Type your email address to confirm. This is deliberately awkward: a mistyped confirmation is better than a closed business.
Your account closes straight away. Nobody can sign in to your kitchens, and your Inspector Portal links and published menus stop working. We email you to confirm.
We keep your account and records for 30 days in case you change your mind. Sign in during that time and you can restore them. After 30 days they are deleted, and there is nothing to email us about.
If you pay through our website, your subscription is cancelled when you close your account, and it stays cancelled if you restore it. If you pay through Google Play or the App Store, cancel it there first.
If you would rather we deleted everything without waiting the 30 days, email [email protected] from the address on the account.
2. If you cannot sign in
If you have uninstalled the app, lost access to the account, or the person who set it up has left, email [email protected] from the address the account was registered with, and ask us to delete it.
We will ask you to confirm the business name, and we may ask something else only you would know — we are not going to delete a kitchen's compliance history on the strength of one email. We will complete the deletion within thirty days, and normally within a few working days.
3. What gets deleted
Everything the service holds for the account:
- Your account details — name, email, telephone number, date of birth and business address.
- Every premises on the account, and every record in it: temperatures, opening and closing checks, cleaning, deliveries, probe calibrations, pest logs, waste, incidents, corrective actions, four-weekly reviews and the rest.
- Everything you recorded about staff: names, contact details, emergency contacts, training records and rota shifts.
- Every photograph and file you uploaded — profile pictures, dish photographs, notice-board attachments and pictures of your own food items.
- Your menus, custom foods and saved meals.
- Registered devices, site login codes and any reminder subscriptions.
- Any Inspector Portal link you published stops working.
4. What we keep, and for how long
- A record of what you paid for, and when — for six years. HMRC requires it and we cannot delete it on request.
- Crash reports — for up to six months from when they were sent. They describe a fault, not your records.
- Ordinary server logs held by our hosting providers, for their own short retention periods.
Nothing in that list can identify what was in your records.
5. Taking a copy first
Once an account has been deleted we cannot restore it, and neither can our hosting provider. If you may need your records later — and food businesses often do, because an officer can ask about a period after you have moved on — export them first. My Account → Export my data gives you everything in a machine-readable form, and each records screen can produce a PDF.
6. Deleting some of it, rather than all of it
You do not have to close the account to remove things. Individual records, staff, menus and photographs can all be deleted inside the app, and a location you no longer trade from can be archived or removed from My Account.
7. Questions
Email [email protected]. What we hold and why is set out in full in our Privacy Notice.