Cleaning Instruction Cards: what they are, what goes on them, and a template

If you clean food-production equipment, someone will eventually ask you to prove how. A Cleaning Instruction Card is the answer to that question, on one page, hanging on the machine. This is what goes on one, what an auditor is actually looking for, and a template you can copy.

Written by Jakub Rimek, freelance developer, Fife · Last reviewed 18 August 2026

What is a Cleaning Instruction Card?

A Cleaning Instruction Card is the controlled document a food factory’s hygiene team cleans from. It covers one piece of equipment and sets out the chemicals at their use rate and contact time, the PPE, the colour-coded utensils, the numbered method and who signed it off. It is the evidence an auditor asks for when they ask how a machine is cleaned. Most factories print it, laminate it and hang it on the machine.

People call it a CIC, a cleaning card, a cleaning instruction sheet or an equipment cleaning procedure. They all mean the same object: the single sheet that tells one person how to clean one thing, correctly, at three in the morning, without going to find a manual.

That last detail is the whole design brief. A cleaning card is read standing up, under bad light, often by someone whose first language is not English, and often by an agency worker who started that week. Whoever writes the card — usually the person who owns the document — is writing for that reader first. Anything that makes it longer makes it less likely to be followed. So a good card is dense but short: numbered steps, pictures instead of paragraphs where a picture will do, and no sentence that is not an instruction.

It is also a controlled document, which is the part people underestimate. If the chemical changes and forty laminated cards on the wall still name the old one, the cards are now evidence against you rather than for you. Version numbers, an authorisation date and a way of knowing which cards are stale matter as much as the content.

What must a cleaning instruction card contain?

There is no legal list. In practice a card only works if a cleaner can do the job from it alone and an auditor can verify it afterwards, and that comes down to nine things: what it covers, its reference and version, how often, isolation and safety controls, PPE, chemicals with use rate and contact time, the colour-coded equipment, the numbered method, and verification and sign-off.

1. What it covers. The equipment, and where it is: site, line or area, and the machine by its real name on the floor, not just its asset code.
2. Reference and version. A unique reference, a version number, and the date the current version was authorised. This is what lets you find every stale copy when something changes.
3. Frequency. How often the clean is done, and which type it is. Most equipment has more than one card: a daily rinse and a weekly full strip-down are different jobs with different chemicals.
4. Isolation and safety controls. Lock-off, isolation points, guards to be removed, permits required. If someone has to put a hand inside a machine, this belongs at the top of the card, not buried in step 7.
5. PPE. What to wear, shown as pictograms rather than a sentence. Gloves, apron, face shield, boots — and where the requirement changes mid-procedure, say so on the step it changes at.
6. Chemicals. Product name, what it is for, the use rate or dilution, the contact time and the water temperature if it matters. A chemical named without its rate and contact time is not an instruction, it is a hint.
7. Colour-coded equipment. Which colour of brush, scraper, squeegee and cloth. If your site runs a colour-segregation regime, the card is where it gets enforced, and a small colour legend on the sheet does more than a poster in the corridor.
8. The method. Numbered steps in the order they happen, one action per step. Dismantle, remove debris, apply, contact time, agitate, rinse, sanitise, reassemble, inspect. Photographs of the awkward parts, with the point of interest marked.
9. Verification and sign-off. The inspection points that say the job is finished, who checks them, and space to record that the clean was done, by whom and when. Plus the authorisation of the card itself.

Two more things are worth adding when they apply: a reference to the risk assessment or COSHH assessment that covers the chemicals, and a QR code linking to the fuller SOP for anyone who wants the detail the card deliberately leaves out.

Does BRCGS require cleaning instruction cards?

Not by that name. BRCGS does not use the term “cleaning instruction card” — that is the industry’s name for the document. What the cleaning and hygiene clause asks for is documented cleaning procedures for equipment covering responsibility, frequency, method, the chemicals and their concentrations, and records showing the cleaning was done and checked. A cleaning instruction card is the shape that requirement usually takes on the factory floor.

So the honest answer is that the standard requires the content, not the format. You could satisfy it with a ring binder of A4 procedures and a separate signing sheet. Sites move to cards because a binder in the office does not get read by the person doing the work, and an auditor who watches a clean being done against a card on the wall gets a much shorter conversation than one who is handed a folder.

The same content requirement turns up in other schemes and in customer codes of practice under different names. If you already hold one certification, the card you build for it will nearly always carry over.

Cleaning instruction card template

One side of A4, in a fixed order: a header block that identifies the card, a safety block, a chemical table, a numbered method, inspection points, and a sign-off strip along the bottom. The full field-by-field template is set out in the table on this page, and CIC Maker builds the same structure for you.

Copy this into a document, or use it as a checklist against the cards you already have.

What’s the difference between a CIC and a hygiene SOP?

Scope and audience. A hygiene SOP is the written procedure for a whole activity — how the wash bay runs, how chemicals are decanted, what the CIP cycle does — and it lives in a manual. A cleaning instruction card is one machine, one page, printed and hung where the work happens. The SOP is what the system says; the card is what the cleaner reads at two in the morning.

In practice the two are layered, and both sit inside the same food hygiene system as the cleaning schedule, the chemical safety data and the verification records. The SOP sets the rules that apply everywhere: the chemical range and who may decant it, the colour-coding regime, the escalation route when something cannot be cleaned. The cards apply those rules to individual machines. Change the SOP and you may have to reissue thirty cards; change one card and the SOP is untouched.

Sites get into trouble when they collapse the two. A card that has grown to four pages because someone pasted the SOP into it stops being read. An SOP that names specific machines has to be reissued every time a line is rearranged. Keep the general rules in one place and let the cards point at them — a QR code on the card is a good way of doing it without adding a paragraph.

Who signs off a cleaning instruction card?

Two signatures doing two different jobs. Whoever wrote or revised the card authorises the content, usually a hygiene supervisor or a technical manager. Separately, the person who did the clean signs the record that the work was done, and a supervisor or QA signs that it was checked. The first is document control; the second is the daily evidence. An authorised card with no completed record proves nothing.

Keeping the two apart is what makes an audit go quickly. The authorisation shows that the method was reviewed by someone competent and is the current version. The clean record shows the method was followed on a given date by a named person and verified. An auditor will usually ask for both, and will ask them as separate questions.

It is worth being strict about who may authorise. If anyone can print a revised card, you have no version control, only paper. One named role, a version number that always increments, and a log of what changed and why is enough — and it is what turns a wall of laminated sheets into a document control system.

Why this tool exists

CIC Maker was built by Jakub Rimek, a freelance developer in Fife, Scotland, out of real work. It started as a replacement for a food manufacturer’s in-house card system: a set of hand-maintained documents that drifted apart every time a chemical, a machine or a colour rule changed, and that nobody could reissue quickly enough when it did. The first version was used to produce and maintain live cleaning cards for production equipment, and almost every design decision here came from watching that go wrong first.

That is why the chemical table has a contact-time column that cannot be left implicit, why photographs can carry numbered pins, why the card refuses to export while it is still a draft, and why every change is written to an append-only log against a named person. None of those are features anyone asks for in the abstract. They are all scar tissue.

It is written for whoever keeps food manufacturing hygiene documentation current: the hygiene manager who has to reissue forty cards when a chemical changes, and the hygiene team leader who has to get the new ones onto the machines.

CIC Maker is free, has no account, no server and no analytics, and everything you build stays on your own computer. There is no company behind it, no paid tier and no trial — one developer, and a tool that solved a problem worth solving properly.

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