Café With On-Site Baking risk assessment (NSW)
Secure your legal baseline with a diagnostic tool authored by a Certified Industrial Hygienist: 43 hazards and 211 controls for cafés that bake on the premises, with espresso, frying and sometimes an on-site roaster, already identified and rated. Answer Yes, No or N/A online and download a finished Word report.
22 activities, 43 hazards, 211 controls. One industry, one login.
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The 22 activities in this assessment
Every activity is assessed in three parts — Safety (18 hazards), Process Safety (7) and Occupational Hygiene (18). Untick any activity you do not carry out and it drops out of your assessment.
✓The inherent hazard register in Word: every hazard here with what could go wrong, the possible consequence and its starting risk rating, to read before the walk and share with the people you consult.
✓Access to the Café with on-site baking online calculator, tied to the email address used at checkout. Answer Yes, No or N/A on a phone or tablet; untick any activity you do not carry out and it drops out of your checklist, results and report.
✓A finished Word report (.docx) with every hazard, your answers, the residual risk and your prioritised Action Plan already in it — to print, sign and keep with your safety records.
✓The health surveillance pathway: when health monitoring is required, a medical referral form for the registered medical practitioner, and a worker respiratory symptom questionnaire.
✓An inspection readiness checklist for a SafeWork NSW visit, and an annual review template.
What this pack is
Generic safety templates leave you with most of the work and all of the liability. A café with on-site baking business that has not managed flour dust as a respiratory sensitiser, powdered enzymes and bread improvers, and combustion products from gas appliances and roasters is exposed to regulatory action, and those are the hazards a general template handles worst.
Flour dust from sack tipping, hand dusting and dry sweeping in a small kitchen, powdered enzymes and bread improvers, fryer oil fires, roaster and afterburner fires, and gas appliance combustion products.
Each business type here is a complete risk assessment for one kind of kitchen, with the hazards and their starting ratings already identified by a Certified Industrial Hygienist. You answer Yes, No or N/A to the controls, and the calculator works out your residual risk, builds the Action Plan and produces the finished report.
Café With On-Site Baking
Workplace risk assessment for cafés that bake on the premises, with espresso, frying and sometimes an on-site roaster in New South Wales: 22 activities, 43 hazards and 211 controls across safety, process safety and occupational hygiene. Completed in the online calculator, which works out control scores, residual risk and a prioritised Action Plan and produces a finished Word report to print and sign.
- ✓43 hazards across 22 activities, each with its consequences and starting risk already rated — the inherent hazard register, in Word, is yours to download at once
- ✓211 controls listed for you, ranked by the hierarchy of control — you answer Yes, No or N/A in the online calculator
- ✓Colour-coded residual risk and a prioritised Action Plan, worked out for you; air monitoring goes on the plan wherever it is a missing control
- ✓A finished Word report to print and sign — attach it to your hazard register and you are audit-ready
- ✓The health surveillance pathway with its medical referral form and worker symptom questionnaire, an inspection readiness checklist and an annual review template
22 activities, 43 hazards, 211 controls. One industry, one login.
Secure checkout via Stripe. Sign in and start as soon as the payment goes through.
Run more than one kind of kitchen? See every business type
The most serious hazards in café with on-site baking
A sample of the 43 hazards in this assessment, each shown with its consequence and the starting risk rating given by a Certified Industrial Hygienist before any controls are counted. The controls themselves are in the calculator.
Flour dust is a respiratory sensitiser: baker's asthma and rhinitis, which can become permanent. Once sensitised, a worker can react to very small exposures. From 1 December 2026 flour (cereal) dust has its own WEL of 0.5 mg/m3 (8-hour TWA, inhalable) - a new entry, much lower than the 4 mg/m3 grain dust figure many bakeries have used as their reference. Occupational Hygiene · inherent risk 4D.
Flour dust is a respiratory sensitiser: baker's asthma and rhinitis, which can become permanent. Once sensitised, a worker can react to very small exposures. From 1 December 2026 flour (cereal) dust has its own WEL of 0.5 mg/m3 (8-hour TWA, inhalable) - a new entry, much lower than the 4 mg/m3 grain dust figure many bakeries have used as their reference. Occupational Hygiene · inherent risk 4D.
Fire spreading to the bakehouse, severe burns. Process Safety · inherent risk 4C.
Roaster and chimney fires spreading to the premises. Process Safety · inherent risk 4C.
Crushed or amputated hands and arms, fractures; mixers have caused fatal and life-changing injuries in bakeries. Safety · inherent risk 4C.
Amputation and crush injuries from unexpected start-up. Safety · inherent risk 4C.
How one hazard is rated
Hazard S1.1 — manual handling of flour and sugar sacks — starts at 3D, rated before any controls are counted. The calculator lists 6 controls for it, from elimination and extraction at the source down to PPE, monitoring and emergency arrangements. You answer Yes, No or N/A for each on the floor. Once the last one is answered it works out the control score, applies any severity reduction earned by physical controls, and shows the residual risk as RED, YELLOW or GREEN. Every control you answered No to goes into your Action Plan, most urgent and most effective first, ready for a responsible person and a due date.
Flour, improvers and coffee in one small room
A café that bakes its own scones, loaves and muffins squeezes a bakehouse into a corner of a busy kitchen. The flour comes out of a sack tipped into a spiral or planetary mixer, off a scoop dusted across the bench, and off the floor with a dry broom.
Flour dust is a respiratory sensitiser, and the harm it causes, baker's asthma and rhinitis, can become permanent. From 1 December 2026 flour (cereal) dust carries its own WEL of 0.5 mg/m3 as an 8-hour inhalable average, far below the 4 mg/m3 grain dust figure many bakers have treated as their benchmark. Powdered bread improvers add fungal alpha-amylase, an enzyme that sensitises at lower doses than flour and has no Australian WEL entry of its own, so it has to be controlled where the pack is opened.
What sets a café apart from a bread shop is the coffee. Grinding roasted beans in bulk and roasting on site release diacetyl and 2,3-pentanedione, both linked to obliterative bronchiolitis and both new WEL entries from 1 December 2026: diacetyl at 0.01 ppm TWA and 0.02 ppm STEL, 2,3-pentanedione at 0.02 ppm TWA. Stored beans and gas appliances add carbon monoxide.
What an inspector checks behind the counter
The assessment sends you to the mixer first. An inspector will want to open the bowl guard and see the hook stop, and to know that the interlock and emergency stop are tested before use each day. Next come the machines that get cleaned mid-service: can each one be isolated at a lockable switch or unplugged in view of the person wiping it, and is there a written isolation procedure with tags or locks?
The espresso machine is treated as pressure equipment, so the question is whether a competent technician services it, pressure relief valve included. If you roast, the cooling tray agitator guard and roaster interlocks are checked, along with how chaff is cleared from the roaster, cyclone and chimney. Every cold room and freezer needs an internal release that works and is not iced over, and portable equipment and RCDs need testing by a competent person at the required interval.
On the hygiene side, expect questions about flour clean-up, whether dust or coffee volatiles have ever been measured, and whether staff can report wheezing.
How a café usually answers the first time
Most cafés go through their first pass with the mixer and espresso controls answered Yes and the dust controls answered No. The floor gets a broom at close, the bench gets a dry brush, and flour arrives in full sacks carried from the delivery door to a low shelf. Nobody has sampled the air, and there is no symptom reporting for flour, improver or coffee exposure.
The controls that move a hazard from yellow to green tend to be physical rather than written. Buying flour in smaller bags or into a bulk bin, a sack trolley or tipper, shelving rated and fixed to the wall, oven loaders or long-handled peels, cool-touch steam wands and a fryer with an automatic basket lift each carry more weight than a new sign.
NOT RATED looks like this: the planetary mixer's bowl guard has been cable-tied open because it slows down adding butter, or the junior reaches into a turning bowl to scrape it down. That is a prohibited practice, so the calculator will not give the mixer a residual rating until the guard is back in service. A cold room door that cannot be opened from inside does the same.
How your controls are scored
Not generic advice — the specific, hierarchy-of-controls measures written into the pack, matched to how these assets actually fail.
Built for the people who do this work
If you operate, maintain or contract to these assets in NSW, this pack is written for your duties.
- ✓Cafés that bake on the premises, with espresso, frying and sometimes an on-site roaster
- ✓Businesses running spiral and planetary mixers, espresso machines, fryers and on-site coffee roasters
- ✓Owners and managers who need a risk assessment that stands up to a SafeWork NSW visit
- ✓Safety coordinators covering several sites or several brands
- ✓Businesses whose insurer, landlord, franchisor or client has asked for a documented assessment
- ✓Supervisors inducting apprentices and casual staff onto kitchen hazards
Authored to the codes and the law
The Codes of Practice and Australian Standards these documents are measured against, and the legislation behind them.
- §Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (NSW)
- §Work Health and Safety Regulation 2025 (NSW)
- §Workplace exposure standards for airborne contaminants (Safe Work Australia)
- §Managing risks of hazardous chemicals in the workplace — Code of Practice (SafeWork NSW)
- §Managing risks of plant in the workplace — Code of Practice (SafeWork NSW)
- §Managing the work environment and facilities — Code of Practice (SafeWork NSW)
Frequently asked questions
Add an in-house CIH risk assessment review
Complete your risk assessment using our digital engine, then have our in-house Certified Industrial Hygienist (CIH) and Full Member of the Australian Institute of Occupational Hygienists (MAIOH) review your specific results to ensure bulletproof compliance.
Post-completion expert review
Not sure if you categorised your site’s controls correctly? Complete your online assessment and send us the generated report. Our in-house experts will review your residual risk scores, validate your “N/A” selections, and ensure your action plan adequately addresses your highest liabilities (like hexavalent chromium or LEL environments) before you sign off.
- Scope
- Remote CIH and MAIOH review of your completed calculator report and hazard register.
- Turnaround
- 3–5 business days.
- Pricing
- Remote review is billed at an hourly rate of $250 AUD/hour (total quote based on the number of sections reviewed).
Download it, score it online, sign it.
Read the hazard register, walk the kitchen with the calculator open, and download the finished .docx report with your Action Plan already inside it. Print it, sign it off, and you are audit-ready for this kitchen.
Price in AUD, no GST charged · Jurisdiction: New South Wales — WHS Act 2011, WHS Regulation 2025 and SafeWork NSW Codes of Practice applied
This is a generic risk assessment for a typical business of this kind, to support your due diligence — completing it is not compliance in itself. You must answer it for your own site, consult your workers, put the missing controls in place, and get competent advice where it says so — exposure monitoring, for example, is work for an occupational hygienist. The limits are set out at the front of every report.