HAZARD ANALYSIS TEMPLATE

Why is a process hazard analysis important?

Through hazard analysis process, food business teams can properly prepare and create preventive programs to protect consumers from potential hazards and unsafe conditions. When the hazard analysis step is carried out correctly, the probability of causing foodborne illness, injury, or loss of profit, as a result, is significantly reduced.

Hazard analysis is an essential step for a risk-based program, such as HACCP, to work. Through the activities involved in this process, your involved workers can properly plan and prevent the contamination of your wholesome food products and occurrences of outbreaks and food recall.

If your HACCP team fails to identify and analyze a particular hazard, appropriate safety control measures may not be set for the undetected hazard and can harm your entire processing. Regulatory hazard assessment is the process of finding the root causative agents of potential food safety issues in your operation.

During safety inspections, undetected hazards may prove to be significant problems and will merit the attention of a food safety inspector.

How to complete a hazard analysis with a template?

Hazard analysis is a systematic process. Its effective execution lies in the correctness of each step taken to finish the process. Hazard analysis starts right after your HACCP team has verified that your flow chart diagram is accurate.

To ensure that all potential hazards are identified and analyzed, follow this sequence of steps for a hazard assessment form:

1. List all the manufacturing process steps in your food operation from the flow chart diagram (e.g., delivery of products, cooking process/thermal process)

2. Under each process step, identify every possible food safety hazard and label each hazard according to the types of key hazards i.e., (P) physical hazard, (C) chemical hazard, and (B) biological hazard.

e.g., (P) presence of foreign material residues from food packaging, (M) survival of pathogenic microorganisms after cooking

3. Describe the potential severity of the hazard in question if left uncontrolled and the likelihood of this hazard from occurring. Use the common scale provided in a risk assessment matrix.

4. Clearly identify how the hazard can become a significant problem in the food processor.

5. For processes that are considered to have significant potential to harm consumers, assign appropriate preventive measures.

6. In preparation for the next principle of HACCP, identify whether the process step is critical in controlling the particular hazard with a (YES) or (NO).

Proper hazard analysis evaluates all food safety hazards but only considers assigning preventive measures to hazards that have a reasonable probability of occurring. 

What is the easiest way to analyze hazards?

The traditional way of regular hazard assessments is through manually listing everything and creating tables either on paper or creating a spreadsheet. This process takes so much time and is very prone to human errors. An extensive range of hazard identification and analysis can last up to weeks.

You can use our Free Hazard Analysis Template, which has a built-in gauge for the severity and likelihood of a hazard from occurring and columns where you can clearly assess every hazard. This free basic hazard identification template was made to help HACCP teams accurately analyze and compile hazard evaluations.

You can also use our free flow chart template tool to construct a detailed flow diagram of your operations that you will need for hazard analysis as a step guide. 

Despite the convenience that our free hazard analysis template provides, you would still need to spend more time listing every hazard, analyzing them, and providing justifications and preventive measures for each. But there's a better, more cost-effective solution.

Get your hazard analysis and entire HACCP Plan done in 1 hour

Hazard analysis is just the  first step in the long process of building a HACCP food safety plan. This step already consists of several processes, which will only be followed by additional steps from the 6 remaining principles of the HACCP system. 

Getting your HACCP plan done as fast as you can means being able to operate safely as well. This means that having a HACCP plan is a top priority. Building this plan is not an easy task and takes several days or weeks, even with the help of a food safety consultant.

Luckily, our food safety experts at FoodDocs have come up with a digital solution that produces a done-for-you HACCP plan in just 1 hour! Using our built-in, customizable HACCP plan template builder, you can get a comprehensive HACCP plan template by just answering a few basic questions about your food business.

Once you are done, our system can automatically generate the HACCP plan template through the help of artificial intelligence and further improve it with our help. Sign up for a 14-day free trial today!

You can get all the following components when you use our digital solution:

• Prerequisite programs
• Basic food flow chart of your operations
• Complete hazard identification and analysis
• Established critical control points with critical limits
• CCP monitoring procedures
• Established verification procedures
• Record-keeping and documentation procedures

What is even greater with our system is that you can further customize every component to add, change, or improve the important information and fit your operations even better. 

Save a significant amount of time from building your HACCP plan by using our digital solution. Comparatively, our solution is 500x faster and 15x cheaper than hiring a consultant to do the job for you.

Frequently asked questions

To help you understand this topic on hazard analysis more, here are some of the most commonly asked questions.

What is an activity hazard analysis used for?

Hazard analysis is a procedure used by the food industry to identify and evaluate potential food safety hazards and use the information as a basis for establishing preventive and corrective measures.

How do you perform a hazard analysis?

Hazard analysis is performed by listing all potential food hazards in your operations and describing every hazard based on their severity, likelihood, and general category of hazard. After these basic steps, a clear justification of how these hazards can harm public health and appropriate types of controls must be provided.