HACCP
HACCP
HACCP
Critical Control Point: A step at which control can be applied and is essential to
prevent or eliminate a food safety hazard or reduce it to an acceptable level.
DEFINITION OF TERMS
The first step in any Food Safety Plan (or HACCP Plan)
is to identify all possible food safety hazards that
could occur in your business. First, consider your
processes. These might include:
• receiving goods
• cooking food
• serving food
• waste disposal
There are three types of food
contamination:
Monitoring must be done to ensure that food remains within the critical limits
determined at each critical control point. Put simply, monitoring means checking
that food is safe.
Corrective actions are the actions that must be taken if a deviation from an acceptable
critical limit occurs. These are either immediate or preventative.
An immediate corrective action is stopping a breach that is happening now. For example:
• throwing out contaminated food
• rejecting a food delivery with signs of pest infestation
• refrigerating food to keep it out of the Temperature Danger Zone (4°C–60°C/40°F–140°F*)
A preventative corrective action is stopping a breach from occurring in the future. For
example:
• performing routine maintenance on equipment
• changing work procedures
• training staff to follow food safety best practices
6. ESTABLISH RECORD KEEPING
PROCEDURES
Record keeping is essential to the effective operation of your Food Safety Plan and must
include an up-to-date hazard analysis and details of any corrective actions that have been
taken in your food business.
There are many day-to-day records associated with your Food Safety Plan. For example:
• delivery checklists
• signed-off cleaning schedules
• temperature recordings
• pest inspection results
• staff training records
All employees should know where the Food Safety Plan is located, what they are responsible
for doing (e.g. updating cleaning schedules, filling out temperature logs), when they need to
do it and who to report issues to. It's common for Health Inspectors to ask for these types of
documentation during a health inspection, so be sure to store them in a safe place.
7. ESTABLISH VERIFICATION
PROCEDURES
Developing your Food Safety Plan is only the first step towards food
safety; consider your first draft (and each new version) a blueprint that
requires real-world testing, adjusting and tweaking. A Food Safety Plan
is a “living document” — it will not and should not stay exactly the
same.
Perform an audit of your Food Safety Plan at least once a year to verify
that it is working as expected, and to identify opportunities to improve
it. Once you have identified these opportunities (and you will), adjust
your Food Safety Plan and implement the necessary changes.
NOTE:
There are several methods that food businesses use to seek out information, including:
• internal inspections
• external audits
• employee feedback