Which food hygiene course do you need? Catering, retail or manufacturing

You've decided on Level 2. You go to buy it, and suddenly there are three versions: catering, retail and manufacturing. Which one is yours?

Café counter with cakes and pastries displayed under glass

The short answer

If you run a restaurant, café, pub, hotel or takeaway, you want the catering version. The retail and manufacturing versions are for shops and food factories.

What's the difference?

All three teach the same basics: germs, temperatures, cleaning, personal hygiene and allergens. What changes is the examples. A catering course talks about kitchens and serving customers. A retail course talks about shop counters and date labels. A manufacturing course talks about production lines.

Version	Who it's for	What the examples focus on
Catering	Restaurants, cafés, pubs, hotels, takeaways, schools and hospitals	Cooking, keeping food hot, serving customers, kitchen cleaning
Retail	Supermarkets, delis, butchers, bakeries and farm shops	Packaged food, shop counters, date labels, stock rotation
Manufacturing	Food factories, dairies, breweries, bottling and packing	Production lines, large batches, packaging

Who offers which version?

Swipe sideways to see the whole table.

Level 2 version	High Speed Training	Virtual College	CIEH	Highfield (regulated)
Catering	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Retail	Yes	Yes	Check provider	Yes
Manufacturing	Yes	YesPlus a drinks manufacturing version	Yes	Yes

YesNoNot published, worth asking

Does it matter if you pick the wrong one?

Legally, the law asks for training that fits the job, so the most important thing is that the training makes sense for what your staff do. If a chef does the retail version, a lot of the examples won't match their day, and they'll miss things that matter in a kitchen, like keeping food hot during service. Some employers and contracts also ask for the catering version by name. So it's worth getting right.

What if your business does a bit of everything?

Plenty of hospitality businesses do. A hotel might have a gift shop selling packaged food. A café might have a bakery counter. A pub might make its own chutney to sell. That's fine: you can mix and match. Kitchen staff do catering, and anyone who only works in the shop could do retail. There's no rule that everyone has to take the same version.

How to make sure you buy the right one

The versions can look almost identical on a provider's website, so slow down before you click buy. Check the course title says "catering", and check the price is for the version you meant. If you're buying for a team, check every course in your basket, because it's easy to pick the wrong one from a dropdown list.

Ready to choose? Our course comparisons show the catering versions side by side, and our guide to who Level 2 is for helps you check it's the right level.

Sources we used