HACCP Development

HACCP Food Safety Management Systems are the foundation to legal compliance and due diligence – whether you are trying to achieve certification to the GFSI Global Standards, such as BRC Global Standards or FSSC 22000, or whether your intent is simply to remain fully compliant to the European Food Hygiene Regulation (EC 852/2004).

HACCP Development – the cornerstone to food safety management

HACCP Food Safety Management Systems are the foundation to legal compliance and due diligence – whether you are trying to achieve certification to the GFSI Global Standards, such as BRC Global Standards or FSSC 22000, or whether your intent is simply to remain fully compliant to the European Food Hygiene Regulation (EC 852/2004). Our team of food safety consultants will assist you in implementing and developing a practical and robust HACCP Food Safety Management System that is understood and can be operated easily by your staff.

About HACCP Food Safety Management Systems

Article 5 of EC 852/2004 mandates that all food business operators must implement and maintain a permanent and documented food safety procedure based on the Codex Alimentarius HACCP Principles. For those operating to the BRC Global Standards Global Standards, any of the other Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) benchmarked standards, or, for small and micro enterprises perhaps SALSA, we can ensure that your HACCP system meets the stringent and exhaustive requirements that you will find within them. The key steps to implementation of a successful HACCP Plan are as follows:

  • Develop a multidisciplinary HACCP Team to identify the food safety hazards arising from the process or the facility, identified on a flow diagram. To identify and implement controls which are effective at eliminating those hazards or reducing them to a safe level, taking into account national or international standards and legislation applying.
  • Identify the Critical Control Points (CCPs) which are steps at which hazards must be controlled to prevent consumer illness or injury, or unsafe food being passed to the next operator within the food supply chain.
  • Identify Critical Limits which effectively form the boundary between safe and unsafe at a CCP, for instance a chilled temperature of 5C for perishable food storage, a cook temperature of 72C, or a specific filtration step to remove physical or microbiological matter.
  • Implement monitoring measures using trained personnel and accurate manual or automated measuring devices to measure at a CCP, to determine whether values are within the Critical Limit.
  • Implement a corrective action procedure to define and manage potentially unsafe food and unsafe conditions, where a Critical Limit is breached.
  • Implement verification and review systems to routinely check the effectiveness of the HACCP Plan and the controls in place. Review whenever an incident occurs such as serious nonconformity, product withdrawal or emergence of a new food safety hazard.
  • Decide upon and implement appropriate documentation to enable the HACCP controls to be exercised consistently and recorded.

For those who operate in the catering trade we can help you to implement a system based on the Food Standards Agency’s “Safer Food – Better Business” guidelines.

Get in touch with MQM Consulting today

We support all sectors of the food industry, specialising in the implementation of HACCP and food safety management systems

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