What is HACCP a plan?

If you’re working in the food industry, you may well have heard about HACCP plans. They are great tools to help boost on site safety and spot when measures need to be taken to help prevent contamination or accidents.

The HACCP system is a procedural document developed to help food production companies create a clear roadmap of what to consider when building their internal food safety plan.

Using the principles outlined in the HACCP, you can create a bespoke procedure around the inner workings of your food production environment.

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What does a HACCP plan detail?

HACCP stands for Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point. The meaning of each of these terms is covered in our blog on HACCP meaning.

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Who needs a HACCP plan?

HACCP plans are vital for anyone producing food to help keep food produced on site or in delivery safe from biological, chemical and physical food safety hazards.

You achieve a HACCP certificate by clearly showing you know how to plan, implement and maintain an HACCP system. You can achieve level 1, 2 and 3 HACCP certification.

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What to consider in your HACCP plan

If you’re developing your own HACCP plan, there are a few key areas to consider. The first step in developing a HACCP plan is to conduct a hazard analysis to identify possible hazards.

There are other key points to consider in your HACCP plan including:

• Identifying all possible risks within the environment and how this could affect food safety
• Focusing on any critical control points (CCPs) the business needs to address to ensure those risks are removed or reduced to improve food safety
• Allowing limitations for the CCPs
• Creating a plan of action for what is to happen should something go wrong
• Including a section on how to ensure procedures are being followed and are working as they were intended
• Documenting the performance of the HACCP plan to see where things are working and areas that could be improved.

Having a detailed and up-to-date plan based on HACCP procedures is of paramount importance for all food manufacturing production to ensure safety standards are met.

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Analysing food safety hazards

When building your HACCP plan, it’s important to understand what is to be defined as a hazard in order to analyse the potential risks that could be found.

By definition, a hazard is anything that could be considered a dangerous risk to impacting the overall safety or quality of food production and/or being harmful for consumption.

Common causes of food safety hazards include:

• Microbiological – Harmful bacteria
• Chemical – Chemical contamination
• Physical – Unwanted objects in food

To help spot unwanted physical objects in food production, consider using detectable products specifically made for the food industry.

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Summary

Once you understand the risks, the critical control points and what hazards need to be considered, you can begin developing your own procedures based on the principles of the HACCP plan.

Detectamet creates detectable items to be used in food production to help reduce the risk of hazards and food contamination