What is a HACCP Plan and why is it important?
A Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point Plan or HACCP Plan is a food safety monitoring system that allows you to identify and manage biological, chemical, or physical potential hazards and the actions that must be carried out to prevent them from occurring.
Utilising a HACCP plan is essential to the success of your food business in many ways, including:
- It is the most cost-effective way to manage your food safety and sanitation systems.
- Prevents costly fines and/or legal action caused by poor food safety and hygiene offences.
- Helps you build a robust reputation that can attract more customers to your business.
- Allows you to thoroughly evidence your compliance and due diligence.
- Greater employee awareness helps continuously drives improvement in the quality and safety of the food products you provide and your processes.
- Preventing or mitigating risks helps to reduce downtime boosting the productivity of your business.
- Identifying and controlling hazards helps to reduce the likelihood of customer complaints.
How to create your own HACCP Plan.
When planning to create your own HACCP Plan, you need to consider all the critical information you will need to record to ensure your business is successfully identifying and managing potential food safety hazards.
Make sure you have a HACCP Plan for each step of your HACCP process and that this information is clearly presented on each page of your HACCP Plan.
In our free example which you can download below, we have created a field above our table that will allow you to record which process step this HACCP plan page pertains to.
We recommend using a table format to record your HACCP Plan as it the best way to present data for reference purposes and can present a lot of complex data in a very clear and easy way to read.
The first column of your table should record the potential food safety hazards your individual business faces.
Think about all the things that could go wrong at each critical control point or CCP.
CCPs are each stage of the process where potential hazards must be prevented, eliminated, or reduced to a safe level by an appropriate control measure to ensure the food safety.
The next column should be used to record your determined control measures and who is responsible for them.
Control measures are the actions which must be performed to ensure that each hazard is prevented, reduced, or eliminated.
By recording who is responsible for each control measure it allows you to establish traceability and accountability should anything go wrong.
Following on you should include a column to record the critical limit for each hazard.
A critical limit outlines the minimum or maximum acceptable values that the control measure must meet to ensure the potential hazard is prevented, reduced, or eliminated.
Next a column should be included to define how you will monitor and record your control measures.
Monitoring your control measures can help you determine how well they are performing and if they are failing trigger corrective action.
When determining your monitoring and recording procedures you should think how frequently the control measure will be checked and how its success or failure will be calculated.
A column to record corrective action should the control measure fail should then be included in your table.
Think about the action that needs to be taken if a control measure fails and/or the acceptable critical limits are not met.
When thinking about corrective action consider all the steps that must be taken to enable you to not only effectively fix the problem but also investigate its root cause to prevent it from reoccurring in the future.
Lastly, we recommend including a column to record any additional comments you may have after you have performed a verification of your HACCP plan.
Remember it is crucial to both validate and verify your HACCP plan periodically to ensure that it is performing successfully.
Using Jomo247 to manage your HACCP system.
Your HACCP records must be thoroughly detailed, maintained, and kept up to date to ensure that you can evidence compliance to your customers and official regulatory and/or legal bodies.
With Jomo247 one your HACCP has been completed it is automatically stored in your system and can be quickly accessed whenever you need.
With our seamless version control, all updates to your HACCP plan can be stored and used to evidence your consistent commitment to improving your procedures.
Moving your HACCP management system online will help your business move to a paperless workflow which will prevent your important documents being lost whilst also improving your environmental impact.
Evidencing compliance to your auditors has never been easier whether it is on-site or remotely, with Jomo247 you can invite your auditors to your hub for no extra fee – we charge per action NOT per user.
With our tagging feature you can easily reference all the relevant HACCP documentation and locate it quickly on that all important audit day.
Check out more of our Compliance Templates here…
