California Food Handler Card
Get your certificate immediately when you pass!
California Food Handler Training
Learn how to handle, prepare, and serve food safely, no matter your work setting.
Learn about important food safety principles:
- identify how food becomes unsafe and leads to foodborne illnesses
- identify when and which symptoms and illnesses must be reported
- recognize proper hand hygiene techniques and good personal grooming habits to prevent food and food-contact surface contamination
- recognize best practices to keep food safe throughout its flow by using time and temperature controls
- describe how to maintain a clean environment and prevent cross-contact
California requires a food handler card within 30 days of hire — regardless of your age, years of experience, or employment status — if you are involved in food preparation, storage, or handling.
This includes:
- wait staff
- chefs and cooks
- bartenders
- hosts/hostesses that handle food
- bussers
- managers, unless certified as food safety managers
- food warehouse stockers
- dishwashers
Conversely, you aren’t required to earn a California food handler card if you work at the following places:
- grocery stores, and grocery store delis, bakeries, meat and produce departments all under one owner
- retail stores where a majority of sales are from a pharmacy
- convenience stores
- commissaries
- certified farmers’ markets
- health care facilities, including hospital employees
- school cafeterias
- temporary food facilities, such as food booths at a community event
- bed and breakfast facilities
- correctional or residential facilities
- elderly nutrition programs
Regardless of these exemptions, however, your employer may still require that you earn a food handler card.
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Easily Earn your California Food Handler Card