Food hygiene rules for Kampala restaurants, from kitchen to floor
KCCA enforces food hygiene in hotels, restaurants and bars under the Public Health Act. What it asks of food handlers, and a kitchen routine that holds up.
Food safety in a restaurant is mostly habit: what the cook does at 6 a.m. before anyone is watching. In Kampala those habits also have a legal frame, and in 2025 the city authority made clear it intends to use it. This post sets out who enforces what, the one provision of the Public Health Act every restaurant owner should know, and a kitchen routine that satisfies both the inspector and the guest.
Who inspects a restaurant in Kampala
Kampala Capital City Authority runs public health through its Directorate of Health and Environment. KCCA's own description of the directorate's work says it "monitors food handling and food hygiene practices" and that the health department "has the mandate to ensure food hygiene codes of practice in hotels, restaurants, and bars", and that it "generally enforces the Public Health Act". If you serve food or drink inside the city, this is the office whose officers can walk into your kitchen.
Outside Kampala the same role sits with the health inspectors of the district or municipal council, under the same Act.
What the Public Health Act says
The Public Health Act (Chapter 281) is an old law, but two parts of it speak directly to a restaurant.
Section 50, "Employment of infected persons", makes it an offence for a person suffering from a venereal disease in a communicable form to accept or continue work "in or about any factory, shop, hotel, restaurant, house" in any capacity involving "the handling of food intended for consumption, or food utensils". It is equally an offence for the employer to employ or continue to employ such a person in that work, unless the employer proves they did not know and had no reasonable means of knowing. Subsection (3) allows an employer to dismiss summarily, with wages to the date of dismissal, an employee who refuses to submit to a medical examination when there is reasonable cause to suspect infection.
Part XII, "Protection of foodstuffs", regulates buildings used for storing food, and section 102 prohibits any person from residing or sleeping in a room in which foodstuffs are kept. A storeroom that doubles as the night watchman's bedroom is a breach.
The practical consequence of section 50 is that an owner needs to know the health status of the people handling food, and needs to be able to show that they asked. Keep a file for each kitchen and floor employee with the date of their last medical examination and the certificate the clinic issued. Which examinations and how often is set by the health office; the Act itself gives the duty, not the timetable, so ask your division health inspector what they expect and write the answer down.
2025: the city is paying attention
On 22 January 2025, KCCA held a training session for food vendors and market administrators at the Mayor's Parlour, with trainers from Makerere University and the Ministry of Trade and Cooperatives, supported by the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition. The Uganda Broadcasting Corporation reported that the training was prompted by a Makerere University and GAIN study which found serious hazards from reused cooking oil and from improperly handled milk and fish. The Lord Mayor, Erias Lukwago, told participants that "the way we manage food is critical" and urged vendors to keep their surroundings clean, citing vendors' duties under the Market Act 2023.
The training was aimed at markets, but the three hazards it named (old frying oil, warm milk, fish out of the cold chain) are exactly the ones that put a restaurant on the wrong side of an inspection.
A kitchen routine that holds up
Receiving. Check temperatures and dates on dairy, fish and meat at the door, and refuse what is warm. Write the supplier, the item and the time on the delivery note.
Storage. Raw below cooked in the fridge, dry goods off the floor, nothing stored in the room anyone sleeps in. Label open containers with the date.
Oil. Set a rule for when frying oil is changed (by hours of use or by appearance) and log each change. Reused oil was the first hazard the Makerere study named.
The pass. Every ticket should show when the order was fired. Food that has waited too long under the lamp is a quality problem first and a hygiene problem second; a kitchen display that shows ticket age makes both visible to the chef before the waiter notices.
People. A medical file for each food handler, hand-washing stations stocked, clean uniforms, and a written rule that anyone with a stomach illness stays off the line. Section 50 puts the duty on the employer as much as the employee.
Cleaning. A daily and weekly schedule, signed by the person who did it. Inspectors are reassured by a schedule with signatures far more than by a clean floor on the day.
Why the record matters
Hygiene is done with hands and water, but it is defended with paper. If an officer from the directorate asks who handled the fish, when the oil was changed and whether the cook had been examined, an owner with a delivery log, an oil log and a staff file answers in two minutes. An owner without them is relying on memory, and the Act does not accept memory as proof.
Sources
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