HACCP is the most widely acknowledged food safety program in the food industry and is often used as a standard for ...
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HACCP is the most widely acknowledged food safety program in the food industry and is often used as a standard for other food safety plans.
The term Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) is very prominent in the food industry. This program has long been applied in manufacturing companies to minimize and control risks in the production chain that protect the welfare of consumers. In this article, we will learn what the HACCP food safety program is and what constitutes an effective HACCP program example.
The first HACCP food safety program was conceptualized in 1960 by NASA. The program aimed to provide astronauts with food that is safe for consumption in space without the risk of any kind of foodborne illness. The project uses the Critical Control Point system to determine which steps are most prone to risks.
After NASA's success, do you know which food company produced the first HACCP food safety program in the 1950s?
Soon after the success of the HACCP program for NASA, Pillsbury, together with the help of the National Conference on Food Protection (NCFP), established a food safety program to solve their recurring product complaints. The company became the first food production company that produced the first HACCP food safety program.
After the establishment of the first HACCP program, it became the standard HACCP program for food companies around the globe.
A HACCP program is a standard food safety management system in the food industry composed of critical control measures and monitoring procedures that help ensure that food safety is a top priority and is always upheld. The Food and Drug Administration identifies that a HACCP food safety program is made to prevent any problems regarding food safety from occurring even before they happen.
This food safety program contains comprehensive control procedures to prevent producing hazardous food for consumption. A HACCP program is used to establish controls, standards, and monitoring procedures to ensure that raw materials used and finished products produced by your food business will not cause any foodborne illness.
The program starts by identifying potential hazards in your food business and analyzing these hazards to understand the needed controls. It can be applied to retail food stores, food processing plants, and food service businesses.
Several hours of brainstorming, evaluation, and documentation go into creating a good enough program. A food safety program cannot be completed without satisfying a set of prerequisite programs. These programs are foundations of hygiene measures, conditions, and requirements. They aim to produce a sanitary environment and minimize the risk of hazards. They are guides for properly designing facilities, implementing guidelines, and verifying standards and processes. Prerequisite programs aim to promote proper design, implementation, and comprehensive verification of processes.
Let's see some of the most common HACCP prerequisite programs that are required for the initial implementation of a HACCP food safety program.
GMPs involve methods, equipment design, facilities layout, and ingredient handling practices for producing processed foods. This prerequisite program also includes minimum sanitary design principles for producing safe and wholesome products.
It is a part of food quality control that ensures products are consistently produced and controlled while minimizing contamination. GMP includes adequate and effective training for company employee practices.
Read our comprehensive article about GMPs from here.
SSOP is a set of guidelines that aim to maintain a certain level of sanitary conditions in manufacturing and provide a daily monitoring guide for its maintenance. This prerequisite program prevents the production of hazardous foods by ensuring that food handlers know how to clean and sanitize food areas.
This prerequisite program aims to implement four basic principles: deny entry, shelter, food, and destruction.
Some of the important aspects of these programs include training personnel in terms of hygiene and proper behavior in the manufacturing facilities. These programs include orientation and regular reminders on how to use protective gear, operate machinery, and keep the environment consistently clean.
The HACCP program ensures the food items and finished products that your food business produces are always safe for consumption. This food safety program was developed to address potential threats to public health.
The program includes food safety plans to control all types of food safety hazards throughout the food chain, from raw material production or receiving up to the delivery of finished products to the consumers. Building a HACCP program takes time and several rounds of revisions from the initial plan.
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In the food industry, a HACCP program is made by following five preparatory steps and seven main principles.
The members of an effective HACCP food safety program must consist of people who are independent experts in the specific process being evaluated. This means that they must have a specific responsibility to play in the processing as much as in developing the HACCP program. The whole team must consist of people from varying fields of production to ensure that all aspects are covered.
A full description of the product should be made, including relevant safety information such as food composition, physical/chemical structure, packaging, durability, conditions of storage, and method of distribution.
The product's intended use must be clear, and what must not be done, mixed, or prepared with the materials. Similarly, product consumers must be identified. This aspect of a HACCP food safety program includes those not allowed to consume the product due to allergy or vulnerability to severe illness.
This process flow diagram will serve as a complete guide to how the basic conditions of making the product are executed. It will also serve as the backbone of the HACCP food safety program in determining the critical control points.
Upon mapping a diagram of the process for illustrative purposes, the team must ensure that all inflow and outflow of resources are considered by conducting an on-site inspection and verification.
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Principle 1) Conduct hazard analysis
After satisfying the preparatory stages, the team is tasked to list several health hazards along with the whole processing flow. These hazards can be chemical, biological, or physical hazards and are identified as anything which can cause harm to the consumers when ingested. Identifying these hazards is a significant task as this will determine the managing actions of the HACCP food safety program.
The team must accurately identify which among the listed hazards can cause significant problems if deviations occur. Such potential hazards can cause severe health effects if not closely monitored. Hazard analysis considerations such as the assessment for illness caused by the hazards can be used to establish controls.
Principle 2) Establish Critical Control Points (CCP)
After hazard analysis, the HACCP team must establish a controllable processing step to prevent the spread of the identified hazards. A critical control point involves food operations that prevent the multiplication of pathogens through the cooking process and proper heating times. Other CCPs include chemical methods for testing ingredients for chemical residue and analytical testing of physical contaminants such as glass on food.
Critical operations aim to control identified hazards to safe levels. The establishment of CCPs is based on satisfying particular parameters, such as the event that there is no succeeding step to control the hazard. Determining CCPs can be properly performed using tools such as a decision tree or a risk assessment matrix.
Principle 3) Establish Critical Limits
Deviations, although unwanted, can be set to tolerable limits. This task is where the team must create minimum and maximum critical limits to critical control points to render the manufacturing process adequate.
Critical limits dictate the tolerable safe levels for critical control points. Loss of control or breach of critical limits may cause an imminent threat and unacceptable health risk to public safety.
Principle 4) Monitoring procedures
A HACCP food safety program must consist of continuous monitoring procedures to ensure accurate recording for future verification to determine if a critical control point is being controlled. These monitoring procedures will also be used for traceability purposes.
Examples of monitoring activities include microbiological and chemical measurements for the presence of potential hazards. Procedures for monitoring are always accompanied by control factors, such as food temperatures and water activity during a thermal process like drying. The complexity of monitoring depends on the type of CCP and hazards being controlled.
Ideally, food handlers need a monitoring procedure that works on a continuous basis to ensure that all products are food safety compliant. The problem is, it's sometimes impossible to perform sampling when the process is ongoing. As such, batch basis monitoring procedures are often used.
Principle 5) Determine corrective action procedures
Critical limit deviations are sometimes inevitable despite establishing control points, especially if regular maintenance procedures are not observed. As part of an effective HACCP food safety program, the team must develop appropriate corrective actions to address minimum or maximum critical limit deviations. The approach may differ in each situation.
Principle 6) Verification procedure
After the successful implementation of the HACCP program, regular verification of its effectiveness as well as efficiency is important. This addresses whether the program is still fit for the current processing method layout and only results in producing safe food products.
Principle 7) Documentation and record-keeping
An effective HACCP program has a good traceability system that roots in proper documentation and accurate records. As such, it is part of implementing it to file all documents about the, particularly concerned process.
Here is a standard HACCP program example normally used in the food industry:
A company's performance is just as good as its approach to food safety. Establishing a good HACCP program assures your consumers that they will receive quality and safe products. Implementing an effective program requires essential knowledge of what a HACCP program is by learning the basic principles and steps to create a working HACCP program example. Prerequisites for a HACCP program are equally important and are considered the foundation of a good HACCP system.
While food businesses always have the option to seek expert advice for building a HACCP program, there is a better, faster, and more efficient solution. At FoodDocs, we offer a digital solution for fulfilling all of the integral parts of a HACCP plan and the most essential criteria for food safety.
With our customizable digital HACCP plan template builder, you can get the following HACCP plan parts:
HACCP Plan in FoodDocs software
In addition to the major parts of a HACCP program, we can help you set up your prerequisite plans, such as pest control, waste, and allergen management plans. All parts of the automatically generated HACCP plan template can be customized for the addition of information.
FoodDocs helps you achieve all these things and even helps you create your HACCP program and deliver it at the tip of your fingers in just an hour. Start your food safety compliance and save time and resources using our customizable HACCP plan template builder.
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Do you still have a lot of questions related to what is HACCP program? Check out our answers to frequently asked questions on this topic.
The Pillsbury Company helped develop the first HACCP program in the 1950s and was the first food production company to implement it. The project was a collaboration between Pillsbury Company and NASA to produce safe food for the first space expedition of the US. Read more about the history of HACCP here.
Monitoring techniques in a HACCP program refer to established observations that collect information on whether a control measure is food safety compliant. These operations are specific to an established critical control point and consist of parameters for recording.
The main purpose of a HACCP program is to properly identify potential hazards in a food production business and set up appropriate controls to keep these potential hazards at acceptable levels. The program is applicable throughout the food chain process, from raw material production to finished product distribution. It also helps reduce the need for end-product testing to ensure food safety.
The last process step of a HACCP program is the record-keeping and documentation procedures. This process includes the collection of the HACCP plan, monitoring records, employee training records, verification reports, layout, and all other food safety documents. Recordkeeping allows you to store proof that your establishment is running compliant with food regulations and regulatory standards.
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