How to start a food business in the UK: the practical first steps

Most guides to starting a UK food business lead with branding and social media. Skip that for now. Get these six things right first, and everything after them is easier.

1. Register with your local council

You need to register as a food business at least 28 days before you start trading, with the environmental health team at your local council. It's free, and it's a legal requirement, not a nice-to-have.

2. Register as a sole trader (or set up a limited company)

Most people starting out register as a sole trader with HMRC, which gets you a UTR (Unique Taxpayer Reference) for self-assessment tax returns. If you're planning to bring on investors or want liability protection from day one, a limited company might suit better, but sole trader is the simpler starting point for most, and it's easy to set up a Ltd company once you're making the big money.

3. Get public liability insurance

This is the one people skip because it feels optional until the day it isn't. If someone has an allergic reaction, gets food poisoning, or a market stall customer trips over your gazebo, public liability insurance is what stands between you and a claim that could end the business overnight. Most markets and events won't let you trade without it, and it's genuinely cheap for a small operation, often less than a month of ingredients. Sort it before your first sale, not after your first complaint.

4. Open a separate business bank account

Keeping business money apart from personal money isn't just tidier, it's the difference between knowing your real margin and guessing at it. Most high street banks and challenger banks (Starling, Tide, Monzo Business) offer free or low-cost business accounts that set up in a day.

5. Connect your bank to accounting software

Once you've got a business account, link it to something like FreeAgent or Xero. This gets your income, expenses, and eventually your tax return, tracking automatically instead of living in a shoebox of receipts. Most UK business bank accounts integrate directly. You'll thank me for this tip when it's time to submit taxes!

6. Food hygiene and Natasha's Law-compliant labelling

Level 2 Food Hygiene and Safety is the standard course most councils expect, and it's cheap and quick to do online. Pair that with getting your allergen labelling right from day one, see our allergen labelling guide for the specifics.

The system most new food businesses skip

Accounting software tracks money that's already moved, and it's non-negotiable, but it was never built to tell you what a recipe actually costs to make, whether you priced last week's wholesale order correctly, or what you need to buy this week versus what's already sitting in your kitchen. That's a different job, and it's the one most new food businesses skip, right up until they realise they've been selling at a loss for months without knowing it.

This is the same reason accounting software exists in the first place: a growing business runs on systems, not memory. You wouldn't track your taxes in your head, and past a certain point, you can't track your true costs, your orders, and your prep list in your head either. Every order that comes in, every ingredient price that changes, every recipe that needs scaling up for a bigger week, that's all real information, and without a system for it, it lives in a notebook, a group chat, and whatever you remember standing in the kitchen at 6am.

The businesses that grow past the first year are usually the ones that put a system under the parts that used to be guesswork: accounting software for the money that's already moved, and something built for costing, pricing, orders, and production planning for the money that's about to move. One tracks where you've been. The other tells you where you're going, and stops you running out of stock, underpricing a wholesale order, or prepping twice as much filling as you actually needed.

Worth sorting before you take your first order, not after.