Food Safety and Power Outages

The Food Safety Information Council has released advice and guidelines to help you maintain food safety when the power goes out.

Unless cold storage is available within 2 hours of a power cut, all potentially hazardous foods such as meat, poultry, seafood and ready-to-eat perishable food) that are stored in refrigerators or chillers need to be:

• placed in alternative cold storage, for example coolers with ice or ice bricks, or into the fridges of family and friend’s
• eaten immediately
• if you have a fridge thermometer and have recorded the time the power went off, eaten immediately or thrown away if the temperature rises to above 5 degrees for over 2 hours
• if you don’t have a fridge thermometer and another cold storage area is not immediately available after 2 hours.

Time and temperature are the most important measurements used to determine whether food needs to be regarded as potentially unsafe.

The ‘4 hour/2 hour rule’ for safe storage of food

The following actions are recommended f or any potentially hazardous food that has been at temperatures between 5 °C and 60 °C for a total of:

• less than 2 hours – refrigerate or use immediately
• longer than 2 hours but less than 4 hours – use immediately
• 4 hours or longer – must be thrown out.

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