Full-service restaurant dry-storage quarterly deep-check checklist - five lines walked through the room (storage, labeling, pest and mold signs, dates and FIFO, spot count), everything fixable on the spot fixed before the door locks, escalations reported within the week, and the previous quarter's open items cleared first

You are a storeroom coach for a full-service restaurant. Produce a Dry Storage Quarterly Deep-Check Checklist for the backroom manager to run a full storeroom sweep each quarter. Five lines, each in three columns: what to check / pass standard / handling on failure (fix on the spot / photograph and report within the week - one of the two).

Five lines, order fixed:
1. Storage line:
- Check: off the floor and off the walls (nothing sitting on the ground or touching exterior walls), stack heights within limits, and zoning - grains and oils / condiments and dried goods / packaging supplies / cleaning chemicals in four physically separate zones (chemicals apart from food is a hard standard; "just setting it here for a minute" is not an exception)
- Handling: re-palletizing and relocating are fixed on the spot; chronic mixed zoning caused by missing shelving is photographed and reported
2. Labeling line:
- Check: every opened item carries a label - product / open date / shelf life (the original package governs where still readable) / opened by
- Handling: relabel on the spot when the opener is present and the date is confirmable; unclaimed opened items with no label are quarantined pending a decision - used by no one, thrown away by no one
3. Pest, mold, and rodent-sign line:
- Check: caked grain, frass powder, insect tracks at bag openings, mold on walls, droppings and trails in corners
- Handling: photograph and report within the week, every time; the affected batch is stored quarantined from other goods - "looks fine, still usable" is not a judgment the storeroom makes
4. Date and FIFO line:
- Check: items within [X] months of expiry pulled onto a date-pressure list; where one item has multiple batches, whether the earlier batch sits in the accessible position (front, top)
- Handling: the date-pressure list goes to the head chef within the week to be worked into usage; earlier batches buried by stacking are restacked on the spot
5. Spot-count line:
- Check: [N] random SKUs counted on the spot against system stock
- Handling: variances recorded on the spot and routed to the count-variance review procedure (not expanded here); present the difference only, assign nothing

Rules before the door locks (fixed):
- Every fix-on-the-spot item must be finished before the door locks - one checkbox moved per item completed
- Photograph-and-report items are consolidated onto one Deep-Check Open Items sheet with an owner (storeroom / head chef / manager) and a deadline (this week)
- One archive line per check: date, participants, one-line conclusion per line; the first act of the next deep-check is clearing the previous open items - anything uncleared escalates automatically to the store manager

Constraints:
- No scoring, no ratings, no "overall condition" commentary - the checklist produces open items, not evaluations
- No judging whether an ingredient is still edible - pest, mold, and expired items are always "for the head chef and manager to rule on"; the storeroom makes no quality calls
- Threshold X and count N are filled in by the store, not preset
- The check runs on a non-delivery day and contains no receiving-dock items

Why it is written this way

The quarterly cadence is the point: dry-storage decay is a slow variable - daily tidy-ups show no trend, annual checks arrive too late, and buggy grain and stale opened condiments both take a quarter or two to grow into problems. The five lines run storage, labeling, pests, dates, then the books - the first four inspect physical state, the last pulls the ledger in, so the deep-check doubles as a small-scale book-to-floor verification whose variances feed straight into the count-variance review procedure. The two tools interlock.

The fix-now / report-this-week split is the checklist's engine: a checklist without graded handling ends as one long tick-and-forget, every problem staying on paper. "Finished before the door locks" presses the on-the-spot items to their physical limit - re-palletizing, restacking, and relabeling are ten-minute jobs the moment you leave the room become tomorrow, next week, next time.

Chemicals separated from food as a hard standard, pest batches quarantined on sight, and the storeroom making no quality calls - these lines exist to shield the backroom manager: the deep-check record shows the risk was seen and reported, and the disposition authority sits with the head chef and the manager. The storeroom manager who rules "still usable" personally owns every consequence of that call.

"No scores, no commentary" pairs with "clear last quarter's items first": the checklist's output is open items, not opinions, and those items live on until the next check clears them. Without the clearing step, "this week" drifts into "still open next quarter" - and on the open-items sheet, the drift shows itself.

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