HACCP is essentially health and food safety does not make you sick or kill even through food poisoning, poor hygiene, sanitation, or contamination. HACCP was invented by NASA (which is right NASA) and Pilsbury Corporation (United States of America's largest food manufacturer in the 1960s) in the build up of the Space Race between the USA and the USSR in the 50 's-60 's.
It was designed initially to ensure that the food taken by astronauts in space was not contaminated with food poisoning bacteria, harmful chemicals or any other physical agent which can be dangerous for someone who eats it.
HACCP is now the legal requirements in all EU countries, the USA and many other countries worldwide. The being pushed by the World Health Organization and the World Trade Organisation countries legislation. Basically if a food business and you want to export food to other countries you need a HACCP system. This is enforced by the environmental health officers in the UK and health inspectors elsewhere.
It is really very simple. in order to have a HACCP plan you need to:
1. Have a HACCP team (kind of like the health and Safety Team) that will prepare the documentation.
2. the Group shall then by HACCP a flowchart, process of manufacture of food or manufacturing process. E.g. storage inwards, chilled goods, preparation, packaging, finished goods storage, temperature-controlled delivery.
3. you can then take each of these steps in the process and try to identify things that could go wrong (i.e. risk). For example, to store chilled step mentioned above, the refrigerator can break down and the temperature of food could increase and bacteria to multiply. This would be described as a "risk" Bacterial growth (not quite a low temperature).
4. then we describe the control measure of the risk. In the example above, would control measure "Effectively functioning fridge"
5. What do we do then is to decide if the risk is critical to food safety or not, is a critical control point (CCP). There are many ways to do this, but basically all be summarised in this event. We should ask ourselves,if the control measure (in this case "Effectively functioning chilled Storage") do not work, someone will get sick or die if we answer Yes to this question, then this is a critical control point. This means that we must establish critical limits, monitoring and corrective action. In our chilled storage example, the answer to this question is Yes, so often, something involving refrigerated storage is usually a critical control point.
6. Having identified the need to put some CCP numbers with the risk to decide what will be ' safe ' levels and known or critical limits for risk. In our example, we know that food is safe (i.e. bacteria do not grow very quickly) to 8oc so our critical limits are 1-3oc or
7. Therefore, we now know what to measure, we need a monitoring process that describes how to measure the critical limit, how often to do so, to make measurements.
8. we need a corrective action in order to have a plan in place if the process finds a critical threshold monitoring outside the acceptable range, i.e. 2oC in the case of this example.
So, phew!! Is to take a lot of so many food businesses struggle with this, but HACCP is a logical approach to food safety. is an international, comprehensive and a legal requirement in many countries.
You can still learn more on www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foodborne_illness and http://www.foodsafety.gov/
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