Deleting your account and your data
You can do this yourself, in the app, without asking us. It takes about
a minute and takes effect immediately. 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: it is not undoable, and a mistyped confirmation is better than a deleted business.
Your account and its records are removed straight away. There is no waiting period and nothing to email us about.
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 privacy@goodfoodhygiene.co.uk 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
Deleting is final: we cannot restore an account afterwards, 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 privacy@goodfoodhygiene.co.uk. What we hold and why is set out in full in our Privacy Notice.