SOP Maker › SOP software for food manufacturing

SOP software for food manufacturing and hygiene teams

SOP Maker is a free tool for writing, numbering and printing the procedures a food site runs on. It was built inside one, for cleaning, hygiene, production and engineering procedures, and it saves everything to a folder on your own disk.

Free to use, not open source. No account, no server, no upload. Authoring needs desktop Chrome or Edge.

What a food-site procedure has to carry that a generic one doesn't

Most SOP software is written for offices. It gives you a heading, a body and a checklist. That's fine for an approval workflow and no use at all on a wash-down at half past ten at night.

A cleaning or production procedure on a food site has to carry things a generic template has no slot for: the chemical and its dilution, the contact time before rinsing, the water temperature, which parts come off the machine and in what order, the PPE for that specific task rather than the site-wide rule, and a place for the person who did it to sign. It also has to survive being laminated and stuck on a wall in a wet room, which means the printed page matters as much as the screen.

The second difference is the reader. Night hygiene crews are often agency staff, frequently reading in a second language, working against a start-up time. Long paragraphs don't get read. Numbered steps with a photograph and an icon do.

Cleaning and hygiene procedures

Hygiene procedures are the ones that get audited hardest and written worst. The shape that works is fairly consistent:

• What's being cleaned, and when – end of run, weekly deep clean, after an allergen change.
• Lock off and isolate. Who does it and how you prove it's done.
• Strip down, in order, with a photograph of anything that comes off in a way people get wrong.
• The chemical: name, class, dilution, contact time, rinse temperature.
• Rebuild, pre-use check, and the sign-off line.

SOP Maker has section types for each of those rather than one free-text box: numbered steps, steps with a responsible person beside them, step-by-step with photos, PPE tiles, tools and equipment tiles, a caution box, an emergency and first-aid block, and a sign-and-date table at the end. You pick the sections the job needs and leave the rest out.

Document control, and what an audit actually asks

The question in an audit is rarely "do you have a procedure". It's "show me the current version of this procedure, who approved it, when it was last reviewed, and prove the copy on the wall matches". Sites lose time on that question because procedures live in three people's Documents folders under names like slicer clean FINAL v3 (2).docx.

Every SOP built here carries a document-control header: a unique number issued per department and checked for duplicates across the whole folder, the process name, the owner, who prepared it, who authorised it, the revision number and date, the next review date, and a status of Draft, Review or Approved. The number is stamped on every printed page along with a per-page footer, so a page found on its own can still be traced back.

If your HACCP plan names a control, the procedure that delivers that control has to exist in writing, be current, and be the version people are actually using. That's document control, and it's the part a tool can genuinely help with.

The icon set

158 drawn icons come with the tool, in five groups:

• PPE (37) – including the food-specific ones: beard snood, mob cap, chain mail apron and gloves, cut-proof gloves, wellingtons, chemical-proof jacket.
• Chemical classes (6) – acidic, alkaline, caustic, chlorinated, disinfectant, neutral.
• Chemical safety (9) – the GHS pictograms, corrosive and toxic through to environmental hazard.
• Controls (36) – lock off, lock off supplies, cover the motor, cover the control panel, cordon off the area, confined space permit, fogging procedure.
• Tools (70) – ceiling squeegee, bottle brush, blue pad scourer, cloth and bucket, air line, and the rest of the wash-down kit.

They're plain SVG drawings stored in the folder with your documents, so they print sharply and work with the internet off. Icons carry across a language barrier better than a sentence does, which is the actual reason they're there.

Why offline and on your own disk matters

Your procedures describe how your site runs. Cleaning schedules, chemical suppliers, line layouts, changeover times, the controls behind your HACCP plan. Plenty of that is commercially sensitive, and some of it sits under customer confidentiality agreements you'd have to read carefully before uploading it to somebody's cloud.

SOP Maker never sends any of it anywhere. It runs in the browser, writes into a folder you choose on your own computer or shared drive, and works with the network cable out. There's no server, no account, no analytics and no AI calls. Nothing to review with IT, nothing to put through a supplier assessment, no subscription to lose the documents behind.

It also means your documents outlive the tool. They're ordinary files in ordinary folders on your disk. Export is HTML and JSON, plus a ZIP of every Approved SOP, and printing is straight to A4 with per-page footers and no step split across a page break.

Getting started on a site

It ships with eight departments already set up – Production, Technical, Hygiene, Clothing, Distribution & Logistics, HR, Maintenance and a general cross-department bucket – each with its own number series. You can rename them, add your own, or ignore them entirely.

The sensible first move is to write one real procedure, print it, and put it in front of the people who'd have to follow it. The seven-step guide to writing an SOP covers how, and the worked example shows the finished shape. If you want the section structures listed out by procedure type, that's on the templates page.

Free, no sign-up. Authoring needs desktop Chrome or Edge; phones can view and print.