Food safety is one of the most important issues facing restaurants today. There are several reasons why. Food safety deals not only with standards for food storage and prep, but also ensures customer safety and protects restaurants from penalties and closures.
Food safety standards are guided by what is called Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP). This is a process control system that is designed to identify and put a stop to microbial growth and other threats during food production. It is the gold standard for food safety and informs the safety process in foodservice operations of all types.
HACCP and Food Safety
HACCP is based on seven distinct principles: Hazard analysis, critical control point identification, establishment of critical limits, monitoring procedures, corrective actions, record keeping, and verification procedures.
Here we discuss further what these seven principles are and how they keep kitchens – and customers – safe from food safety hazards or poor practices.
The Seven HACCP Principles
- Hazard analysis: This is where hazards that might tamper with food safety are determined, and the preventive measures to control these hazards are identified.
- Critical control points identification: A critical control point (CCP) is a point in a food production process in which control is applied to prevent, eliminate, or reduce food safety hazards to an acceptable level.
- Establishment of critical limits: A critical limit refers to the precise value to which a physical, biological, or chemical hazard must be controlled. A CCP separates safe food from unsafe food and reduces the risk of hazards in the kitchen.
- Establishment of critical control point monitoring requirements: Monitoring the food production process ensures the process is under control at each critical control point. It also ensures hazards are in control. This includes things like temperature checks, visual inspection, and time recording.
Learn more: Determining Critical Control Points
- Corrective actions: If deviation occurs during the monitoring phase, corrective actions must then be taken. These corrective actions ensure any contaminated or tainted product that might be harmful to health does not leave the kitchen.
- Record keeping: HACCP regulations require all documents to be kept in an accessible place, including hazard analysis, monitoring of CCP, critical limits and the checking process deviations detailed above.
- Verification procedures: Verification determines both the validity of the established HACCP plan and whether the establishment is operating in compliance with the plan.
The Importance of HACCP
Implementing a HACCP plan can reduce contamination in the kitchen, save the restaurant money by avoiding costly product recalls, boost customer and consumer confidence, protect the reputation of your business, and establish a reliable traceability system to ensure accountability.
Food safety hygiene procedures is not just an issue of morality and good service, however. It is something enforced by law – including the Food Safety Act of 1990, which prohibits restaurants from:
- Producing food that’s dangerous to customer health
- Producing food that does not comply with food safety standards
- Producing food that is not of the nature, substance, or quality the consumer expects
This is where HACCP comes in. According to Article 5 of Regulation (EC) No 852/2004:
‘Food business operators shall put in place, implement and maintain a permanent procedure based on the Codex HACCP principles.’
Implementing a HACCP plan for your foodservice business is therefore a matter of legality, and can result in fines, shutdowns, or even permanent closures should a foodservice establishment fail to comply.
Tools to Help With HACCP
Thankfully, there are tools like NCCO’s Task Manager to make HACCP implementation and record keeping easy. Through Task Manager, you can build food safety compliance forms and easily access HACCP records with intuitive search, filter, and export functionality. You can also create and schedule cleaning checklists to guide staff through daily hygiene management, monitor refrigerator and freezer temperatures to reduce the risk of spoilt stock, and ensure accountability with reports on demand should anything go wrong.
Task Manager does all of this and more. Gain the benefits of:
- Forms and checklists to guide staff through daily hygiene tasks
- Temperature monitoring that sends alerts when temperatures stray from range
- Analytics and reporting to establish accountability
- Digitised HACCP records easily accessible from the dashboard
This gives managers and proprietors control of their food safety operations. It simplifies record keeping, consolidating food safety and HACCP records in one easy-to-access place so EHOs are never kept waiting during an inspection.