Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) is important because it prioritizes and controls potential hazards in the food production life cycle, such as packaging, labeling, storage and the distribution process.
By controlling the risks, the industry can better assure your customers that you're doing all you can to ensure safe science and technology is used right through the supply chain.
Potential risks may include:
Microbiological contaminants
Chemical contaminants
Physical contaminants
Principle 1: Conduct a hazard analysis
This is where you analyse the potential hazards of the food products, right through the life cycle of the product you have.
Principle 2: Determine the critical control points
This is where you establish prerequisites which are under control as part of the hazard analysis. But you identify the critical hazards that can cause risk within your business.
Principle 3: Establish the critical limits
These may be related to:
Temperature
Time
The products and chemicals used
Limits associated to segregation related to allergens
Principle 4: Establish Monitoring Procedures
How will you put these critical limits under control as part of your critical control points?
Principle 5: Establish Corrective Actions
Those corrective actions may simply be actions that you take, because you've identified greater weaknesses when you conduct your hazard analysis.
They may also be corrective actions that you put in place, because there may be deviations occur within your business during normal business activities.
They could be activities that occur outside of normal business operations - such as maintenance activities, shutdowns that we may have once a year.
Principle 6: Establish verification procedures
What is it you are going to do to verify the hazard analysis that you've looked at?
What are the Critical Control Points? What are the critical limits? What verification actions have been taken?
Principle 7: Documentation and Record Keeping
You must be able to establish that you're meeting legal requirements under international standards like ISO 27001, and possibly even requirements under international standards, for example, the British Retail Consumer standard (BRC)
You have to be able to keep these records in the chance that something has gone wrong and an investigation takes place.
If you want to know a little bit more about HACCP, you can watch a full webinar recording here, where we go into a lot more detail about this subject.
Remember to subscribe to blog notifications if you are finding this content useful!