Food Safety and Hygiene - HACCP

Food safety 1 | Food safety 2 | Food safety 3 | Food safety law | COSHH | HACCP |

What does "H.A.C.C.P." stand for?

Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points

Operators of food businesses must analyse the processes in their business, identify any possible hazards in those processes, and assess how those hazards con be reduced or eliminated so that the final consumer is not affected. The points at which the hazards are assessed are known as Critical Control Points. Having assessed the hazards and introduced some form of control, they must be monitored regularly and amended as necessary.

What do you need to do?

Identify potential hazards:

• Assess what possible food hazards there are in your business
• Identify the areas where they could occur
• Pinpoint those areas that are critical to ensuring food safety

Introduce controls:

• Make sure you have adequate safety controls in place at those points critical to ensuring food safety
• Regularly monitor the controls to check they are working effectively
• Maintain and review all controls
• Review your assessment, control and monitoring procedures periodically, and whenever the food operations change

Identify Hazards

You need to identify all hazards, and decide which are critical for food safety. If no major hazards exist, your analysis can simply be based on your own judgement, with no need for specialist skills or complicated techniques. Whichever method you choose, it should be systematic and should take into account:

• All potential hazards
• All aspects of your food business operation
• Your actual working procedures and conditions

You may find it helpful to draw a flow diagram of your operation from purchase of ingredients through to the sale or service of food. Food hazards can then be identified at each step and any necessary controls put in place.

What sort of hazards are there?

There are essentially three categories of food hazard:

Microbiological

• Could harmful bacteria be present in or on the food?
• Could foods, particularly ready-to-eat foods, be contaminated?
• Could harmful bacteria grow to dangerous levels in the food?
• Could harmful bacteria survive a process, like cooking, meant to destroy them?

Chemical

• Could toxic chemicals get into the food? (Cleaning chemicals)

Physical

• Could dangerous glass shards or pests get into the food?

Introduce controls - when consider controls remember:

They must be effective

The controls should either completely eliminate the hazard or reduce it to a safe, acceptable level.

They should be practical

Try to ensure that controls can be applied to your business in a realistic and sensible way. You could change either the nature of the control or the operation.

They should be understood

You should tell appropriate staff about the importance of any controls in place, particularly any for which they are responsible.

The following table shows some, but not all, of the potential steps, hazards, controls, monitoring and corrective action procedures a caterer may need to consider, for example: