HACCP – Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point – should ring familiar in food safety professionals’ ears. An HACCP plan ensures food safety and includes risk analysis in the entire product lifecycle. The FDA demands food companies have one, but let’s get back to why it matters, and what it takes to make it effective.
The key ingredients
A good food safety plan includes hazard analyses, preventive controls, monitoring procedures, corrective actions, verification procedures, and quality documentation. HACCP follows the same principles, calling for hazard analysis, CCP identification, CCP monitoring, etc. However, it includes one extra step: implementing additional, specialized procedures to ensure the HACCP plan’s effectiveness. For this purpose, it’s crucial to have a designated expert in your team who can manage these procedures. Of course, food safety is a company-wide matter, especially since HACCP concerns not just the manufacturing process but also everything that precedes and follows it. However, if there is no designated qualified manager overseeing things, it’s easy to get lost in a maze of decisions that should be taken but are not.
The importance of training
A good food safety leader is vital, of course, but the rest of the company needs to follow suit, which can only happen with the right learning. This also ensures the knowledge doesn’t just stay with one person. One should be mindful of over-emphasizing training, though. Training is a practical application of knowledge, which should be acquired before it can be put into practice, and continuously built upon. HACCP is so broad and encompasses so much during the whole process, that in terms of daily applications, very little during a single training will be applicable to everyone. A good first step is to acquire the right foundation of knowledge, and then train for the right applications specific to each job or specialization.
What’s crucial is making the link between learning and doing, tangible.
Get that certification
It may seem like a superfluous extra step for your designated HACCP expert to go through examinations to obtain certification, especially because such certifications are individual and labor-intensive. However, your HACCP manager needs to be qualified, and for your company’s reputation, it pays to be able to prove their qualifications. Certification, no matter how rigorous, promotes learning, and therefore solidifies the person’s skills, and in turn your company’s reputation. You show the consumer and to the FDA that the necessary knowledge and skills are present, and that you take food safety as seriously as it should be taken.
For these thoughts on going back to the basics with HACCP, we were inspired by a piece by Larry Lynch which was published in a Food Safety Magazine publication called A Guide to HACCP Compliance, which holds a lot more interesting thoughts.
When it comes to food safety, how often do you have to get back to the basics? Share your thoughts!