The Seven HACCP Steps
Posted by Conner Gesbocker on Fri, Oct 06, 17
Step 1: Conduct a hazard analysis
- Facilities determine the food safety hazards, then identify the preventive measures the facility can apply to control these hazards.
- Facilities determine the food safety hazards, then identify the preventive measures the facility can apply to control these hazards.
- A critical limit is a 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.
- Monitoring activities are necessary to ensure that the process is under control at each critical control point. FSIS is requiring that each monitoring procedure and its frequency be listed in the HACCP plan.
- 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. Corrective actions are intended to ensure that no product injurious to health or otherwise adulterated as a result of the deviation enters commerce.
- The HACCP regulation requires that all facilities maintain certain documents, including its hazard analysis and written HACCP plan, and records documenting the monitoring of critical control points, critical limits, verification activities, and the handling of processing deviations.
- Validation ensures that the plans do what they were designed to do; that is, they are successful in ensuring the production of safe product. Facilities 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, that is, working as intended. Verification procedures may include such activities as a 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 facilities personnel. Verification tasks would also be performed by FSIS inspectors. Both FSIS and industry will undertake microbial testing as one of several verification activities. the occurrence of the identified food safety hazard.
