HACCP is basically health and safety for meals so it doesn’t make you sick or even kill you through meals poisoning, poor hygiene, sanitation or contamination. HACCP was devised by NASA (that is right.. NASA) and Pilsbury Corporation (USA’s largest food producer in the 60’s) in the build as much as the house race between the USA and the united states in the 50’s – 60’s. It was initially designed to ensure that the meals the astronauts took into space was not contaminated with meals poisoning micro organism, dangerous chemical compounds or another physical agent which is perhaps harmful to someone who eats it.
HACCP is now a authorized requirement in all EU nations, the USA and plenty of different nations worldwide. It’s pushed by the World Health Organisation and the World Trade Organisation into international locations legislation. Basically if you’re a meals business and need to export food to different countries you need a HACCP system in place. It is enforced by Environmental Health Officers in the UK and Health Inspectors elsewhere.
It is really quite simple; with the intention to have a HACCP Plan you need to:
1. Have a HACCP Staff (form of just like the Health and Safety Staff) who will draw up the documentation.
2. The HACCP Team then draws up a Process Circulation Diagram of the meals preparation or manufacturing process. E.g. Goods Inwards, Chilled Storage, Preparation, Packing, Completed Items Storage, Temperature Controlled Delivery.
3. You then take each of these process steps and try to identify things that might go wrong (i.e. hazards). For example, within the Chilled Storage step mentioned above, the fridge might break down and the temperature of the food might enhance and bacteria present can them multiply. This would be described as a hazard “Bacterial development (temperature not low enough)”.
4. Then we describe the management measure for the hazard. Within the above example, the management measure would be “Effectively working refrigerator.”
5. What we do next is determine if the hazard is essential to meals safety or not, i.e. is it a Vital Control Point (CCP). There are a number of ways to do this but basically all of it boils down to this fact. We need to ask ourselves ‘If the control measure (in this case “Successfully Working Chilled Storage”) have been to NOT WORK, would somebody get sick or die because of it?’ – If we answer sure to that question then this is a Important Control Point. That means we must establish Crucial Limits, a Monitoring Procedure and a Corrective Action. In our Chilled Storage instance the answer to this query is usually yes and due to this fact anything that includes refrigerated storage is normally a Vital Control Point.
6. Having recognized a CCP we need to put some numbers on the hazard to resolve what the ‘known and safe’ levels or Essential Limits could be for that hazard. In our instance, we know that food is safe (i.e. micro organism do not develop very fast) at 5oC so our Critical Limits are 1-5oC or <5oC.
7. So now we know what to measure we need a Monitoring Procedure that outlines methods to measure the vital limit, how usually to do it who’s to do the measuring.
8. We’d like a Corrective Action so that we have now a plan in place within the event that the Monitoring Procedure finds a Vital Restrict outside the settle forable range, i.e. >5oc in this instance’s case.
So there you’ve gotten it, phew!! It’s so much to absorb and that’s why a lot of meals businesses struggle with it however HACCP is a logical approach to ensuring food safety; it is worldwide, comprehensive and a legal requirement in many countries.