TenorOpsFood Safety
Yukon Restaurant Inspection Readiness Check
Yukon's restaurant rules date from 1961 and don't require a food handler certificate. This free check scores your kitchen out of 100 anyway.
Old rules, public reports
The regulations Yukon restaurants are inspected under were signed in Whitehorse in January 1961. The Eating or Drinking Places Regulations have been amended only a few times since, and much of the text reads like its era. Temperatures are given in Fahrenheit, and nothing in it requires food handler training or certification.
Inspection results are another matter. Yukon publishes health inspection reports online, so anyone can look up what an officer found on a routine, follow-up or complaint visit.
So the question for a Yukon operator isn't only whether a health officer would find something on the next visit. It's also what your customers can read about the last one.
The Yukon inspection readiness check is built with that in mind. It's free, takes a few minutes, and gives you a score out of 100 with your biggest gaps before you leave the page.
Who inspects, and what they can do
Health officers with the Government of Yukon's Environmental Health Services inspect food premises across the territory. Under the regulations, you need the health officer's written approval before you open, and the officer can attach conditions to it. A health officer may come in at any reasonable time and examine the premises and anything used to run it.
When something doesn't comply, the officer can give the operator directions to fix it. If the operator doesn't follow them, the health officer reports it to the medical officer of health. That's why one of the two Yukon questions asks plainly whether every violation from your last report has been corrected.
How ready is your kitchen? Score it against Yukon's rules in about three minutes. Take the free check →
Training: not required, still asked
The regulations don't require anyone in a Yukon restaurant to hold a food handler certificate. There's no rule about a certified person on shift, and no rule about the owner being certified either.
The check asks about training anyway: has at least one person on every shift taken a course such as FOODSAFE Level 1? The question is worth less than the others, and the result says plainly that it's good practice rather than a legal rule. The case for it is simple. The person who knows why the walk-in has to stay cold is the one who notices when it isn't.
Yukon University runs FOODSAFE Level 1. If you hire people trained elsewhere, our Canada food handler certification guide explains what other provinces require.
The rest of the check
The other nine questions are the ones we ask in every province and territory, because inspectors everywhere start with the same handful of things:
- temperature checks, and whether you write them down
- cooling big batches of soup, stock, rice and braises
- handwashing sinks
- staff illness
- sanitizer and dishwasher testing
- a cleaning schedule
- storage and labelling
- allergens
- pests
A couple of these trace straight back to the 1961 text. Where a chemical is used to sterilize utensils, the operator has to use suitable testing equipment and test often enough to keep the solution at the right strength. An operator also must not let an employee prepare, cook, store or serve food while there's reason to believe or suspect that employee has a communicable disease.
Your score and the full report
Your score and top gaps show on screen as soon as you finish, and each gap comes with a line on why it matters.
Leave your email and we'll send the full report. It goes through every gap, not only the top ones, with a fix plan for each and links to printable checklists. Those checklists can also be opened in a free TenorOps account.
A high score means your answers line up with what inspectors commonly look for. It isn't an inspection result, and it doesn't show that you comply with the regulations. The reports written by Environmental Health Services are the only official results.
For a longer look at Yukon's rules, including serving wild game, see the Yukon restaurant food safety checklist. If you're already working through items from a report, responding to food inspection violations sets out a step-by-step approach.
Take the Yukon check now. If you have locations elsewhere, the Canada inspection readiness check links to every province and territory.