Food Standards Agency

Authority

Official guidance

Territories

GB

Primacy

primary

Commercial interest

none

Retrieved

2026-08-13

State

Read and citable

Original document

Publishes a set of equivalent time-and-temperature combinations rather than a single number: 80 °C for 6 seconds, 75 °C for 30 seconds, 70 °C for 2 minutes, 65 °C for 10 minutes, 60 °C for 45 minutes. Content is in the process of migrating to gov.uk; the food.gov.uk URL currently redirects.

Safety, Technical

• Explicitly not culinary practice: The FSA sets safety thresholds. It does not publish guidance on how food should taste or be cooked for quality, and citing it for that would borrow authority it has not claimed.

• “70°C for 2 minutes”

  The Food Standards Agency gives 70 °C held for 2 minutes as a time-and-temperature combination that reduces harmful bacteria to a safe level.

  How it was measured:

  Temperature is that of the food itself, at the slowest-heating point.

  Equivalent to a six-log reduction in vegetative bacteria.

  Where it applies:

  England, Wales and Northern Ireland; Scotland follows equivalent guidance.

• “60°C for 45 minutes, 65°C for 10 minutes, 70°C for 2 minutes, 75°C for 30 seconds”

  The FSA lists equivalent combinations: 80 °C for 6 seconds, 75 °C for 30 seconds, 70 °C for 2 minutes, 65 °C for 10 minutes, and 60 °C for 45 minutes.

  The combinations are presented as alternatives, not as a scale of increasing safety.

  Long, low cooks may satisfy a lower-temperature combination many times over without ever reaching the highest figure.

• In the UK, food is considered adequately cooked when it reaches 70 °C held for 2 minutes, or an equivalent time-and-temperature combination.

If this source changes, these are the claims that need rechecking. That is the point of recording provenance per claim rather than per page.