CFPM Cheat Sheet.
The night-before summary, built like the exam.

Every accredited Certified Food Protection Manager exam, whether you sit it through ServSafe, the National Registry of Food Safety Professionals, Prometric, StateFoodSafety, or 360training, is built on the same source document: the FDA Food Code, currently the 2022 edition (the 10th). That is the best possible news for memorization, because one set of numbers covers all five providers' exams.

One honest caveat before the tables: no provider publishes its live exam form, so there is no official list of exactly which figures appear on your test. What follows is the Food Code spine every accredited exam draws from, organized the way your brain will need it under time pressure, with a memory hook per table.

Cooking temperatures: walk down the 165-155-145 ladder

Minimum internal temperature	Foods	Time at temperature
165°F	Poultry, stuffed foods and stuffing containing meat, wild game animals	Instantaneous (less than 1 second)
155°F	Ground and comminuted meats and fish, ratites, eggs held for later service	17 seconds
145°F	Whole-muscle meat, fish, eggs broken and cooked to order for immediate service	15 seconds

Memory hook: the ladder drops by 10 as the food gets less processed. Anything stuffed, mixed, or high-risk sits at the top rung (165°F), grinding puts meat on the middle rung (155°F), and intact cuts, fish, and a to-order fried egg stay on the bottom rung (145°F). If someone tampered with the muscle structure, climb a rung.

Reheating and cooling: the clocks

Process	Target	Clock
Reheat cooked-and-cooled TCS food for hot holding	165°F for 15 seconds	Within 2 hours maximum
Reheat commercially processed ready-to-eat food for hot holding	135°F	Rapidly, for hot holding
Cooling, stage 1	135°F down to 70°F	Within 2 hours
Cooling, total	Down to 41°F or less	Within 6 hours total
Cooling food made from ambient ingredients (canned tuna, reconstituted foods)	To 41°F or less	Within 4 hours

Memory hook: reheating reuses the poultry number, 165°F. Cooling is "2 to 70, 6 to 41": the first 2 hours must do the dangerous half of the drop, and 2 + 4 = 6 gives you the remaining stage. Room-temperature ingredients never got hot, so they get one flat 4-hour clock to 41°F.

Holding and receiving: 135 and 41 are the walls

Situation	Rule
Hot holding	135°F or above (roasts may be held at 130°F or above)
Cold holding	41°F or less
Receiving refrigerated TCS food	41°F or below
Receiving raw eggs	Ambient air of the delivery equipment at 45°F or less
Receiving hot TCS food	135°F or above

Memory hook: 135 and 41 are the two walls of the temperature danger zone, and receiving simply mirrors holding: cold arrives at cold-holding temperature, hot arrives at hot-holding temperature. Eggs are the one oddball, and their 45°F is an air temperature for the delivery equipment, not the egg itself.

Time rules that are not temperatures

Rule	Number
Date marking for refrigerated ready-to-eat TCS food held over 24 hours	7 days maximum at 41°F or less; prep day counts as Day 1
Time as a public health control, starting hot or cold	Serve or discard within 4 hours
Time as a public health control, cold start never exceeding 70°F	Up to 6 hours
Cleaning food-contact surfaces in use with TCS food	At least every 4 hours
Handwashing (hands and exposed arms)	At least 20 seconds
Exclude a jaundiced employee	When onset was within the last 7 calendar days

Memory hook: the sevens travel together (7-day date marking, 7-day jaundice window), the fours travel together (4-hour discard clock, 4-hour surface cleaning), and the time-control clocks echo cooling's 4-and-6 pattern. A Monday prep with a 7-day limit dies on Sunday, because Monday itself is Day 1.

Sanitizer concentrations

Sanitizer	Concentration	Conditions
Chlorine	25-100 ppm depending on conditions; 50-99 ppm is the common working band	Minimum water temperature varies with concentration and pH (for 50-99 ppm: 75°F at pH 8 or less, 100°F at pH 10 or less)
Iodine	12.5-25 ppm	Water at least 68°F, pH 5.0 or less
Quaternary ammonium (quat)	Per the manufacturer's EPA-registered label	Water at least 75°F

Memory hook: iodine is the decimal one (12.5 starts the range), chlorine is the wide band where hotter or better-matched water lets concentration flex, and quat is the one with no printed number at all. The Food Code deliberately declines to publish a single quat figure; the manufacturer's label is the law of that bucket.

The Big Six illnesses

A food employee diagnosed with any of these must report it to the person in charge:

• Norovirus
• Hepatitis A virus
• Shigella spp.
• Shiga toxin-producing E. coli (STEC)
• Salmonella Typhi (typhoid fever)
• Nontyphoidal Salmonella

Pair the list with the exclusion rules: an employee symptomatic with vomiting or diarrhea is excluded from the establishment outright, and jaundice with onset in the last 7 days is likewise an exclusion.

Memory hook: two viruses (Norovirus, Hep A), two S-bacteria (Shigella, STEC), and Salmonella twice (Typhi and nontyphoidal). Viruses, S-pair, Salmonella double.

The nine major allergens

• Milk
• Egg
• Fish
• Crustacean shellfish (crab, lobster, shrimp)
• Tree nuts
• Wheat
• Peanuts
• Soybeans
• Sesame

Memory hook: the classic eight plus sesame, which the 2022 Food Code lists alongside the others. Remember the pairs: two from animals' bodies (milk, egg), two from water (fish, crustacean shellfish), two nuts (tree nuts, peanuts), two seeds and a grain (soybeans, sesame, wheat).

Related rule worth one flashcard: bare hands never touch exposed ready-to-eat food; deli tissue, tongs, spatulas, or single-use gloves stand between skin and anything served as-is.

The last number: five years

Your certificate, once you pass any accredited provider's exam, is typically valid for 5 years from issuance; that is the term Florida's Department of Health states for accredited food manager certificates, and the convention most jurisdictions follow. Local rules control recognition and renewal, so verify with your health department rather than assuming.

Take the printable with you

One sheet, any provider

Everything above holds no matter which exam you sit. The Conference for Food Protection program is accredited by the ANSI National Accreditation Board (ANAB), and accredited testing organizations include ServSafe (National Restaurant Association), the National Registry of Food Safety Professionals, Prometric, StateFoodSafety, and 360training, so the Food Code numbers on this sheet are the shared core every provider draws from.

These tables condense the FDA Food Code figures that accredited CFPM exams return to again and again. Drill them until the ladder, the walls, and the clocks come back without effort: our free CFPM practice questions will show you which rows are still shaky, and the CFPM study guide puts the numbers in their full Food Code context. When you are ready for the version that lives on the kitchen clipboard, grab the printable CFPM cheat sheet.