At Quiksilver, product quality and safety comes first. We can provide guidance and technical assistance toward an HACCP plan that works for you.
Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points
Definition: "a systematic prevention approach to food safety and pharmaceutical safety that addresses
• physical [glass, wood, metal etc],
• chemical [pesticides, toxins, allergens etc], and
• biological [pathogenic bacteria, fungi, viruses, prions etc]
hazards as a means of prevention"
—Wikipedia
The 7 HACCP Principles
- Conduct a hazard analysis.
- Plants determine the food safety hazards identify the preventive measures the plant can apply to control these hazards.
- A food safety hazard is any biological, chemical, or physical property that may cause a food to be unsafe for human consumption.
- Identify critical control points. (CCPs).
- A CCP is a point, step, or procedure in a food process at which control can be applied and, as a result, a food safety hazard can be prevented, eliminated, or reduced to an acceptable level.
- Establish critical limits for each CCP.
- A critical limit is the maximum or minimum value to which a physical, biological, or chemical hazard must be controlled at a critical control point to prevent, eliminate, or reduce to an acceptable level.
- Establish CCP monitoring requirements.
- Monitoring activities are necessary to ensure that the process is under control at each CCP.
- FSIS is requiring that each monitoring procedure and its frequency be listed in the HACCP plan.
- Establish corrective actions.
These are actions to be taken when monitoring indicates a deviation from an established critical limit. (The final rule requires a plant's HACCP plan to identify the corrective actions to be taken if a critical limit is not met.)- These actions are intended to ensure that no product injurious to health or otherwise adulterated as a result of the deviation enters commerce.
- Establish record keeping procedures.
- The HACCP regulation requires that all plants maintain certain documents, including its hazard analysis and written HACCP plan, and records documenting the monitoring of CCPs, critical limits, verification activities, and the handling of processing deviations.
- Establish procedures for verifying the HACCP system is working as intended.
- Validation ensures that the plans are successful in ensuring the production of safe product. Plants will be required to validate their own HACCP plans. FSIS will not approve HACCP plans in advance, but will review them for conformance with the final rule.
- Verification ensures the HACCP plan is adequate, working as intended. The procedures may include such activities as review of HACCP plans, CCP records, critical limits,and microbial sampling and analysis. FSIS is requiring that the HACCP plan include verification tasks to be performed by plant personnel. Such tasks would also be performed by FSIS inspectors. Both FSIS and industry will undertake microbial testing as one of several verification activities.