HACCP and food safety management

Every food business must have procedures based on HACCP, in proportion to its size and what it does. HACCP stands for Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point. It means working out what could go wrong and controlling the steps that matter most.

A HACCP-based system has seven main ideas. Identify the hazards at each step. Find the critical control points, which are the steps where control is essential to keep food safe. Set a limit for each one, such as a core temperature. Monitor it. Decide what to do if the limit is missed, which is called corrective action. Check that the system works. Keep records.

Take a chicken curry. The hazard at the cooking step is bacteria surviving in the chicken. Cooking is a critical control point, because nothing later in the process will put this right. The limit is a core temperature of 75°C for 30 seconds, or an equivalent. You monitor it with a probe. If the reading is too low, the corrective action is to keep cooking. You then record the check.

Small businesses do not have to write all of this from scratch. Ready-made packs are free to use. In England and Wales, the pack is Safer Food, Better Business (SFBB), and a Welsh version is available. In Northern Ireland, it is Safe Catering. In Scotland, it is CookSafe for caterers and RetailSafe for retailers. MyHACCP is the FSA's free online HACCP tool. SFBB is built around the 4Cs of cross-contamination, cleaning, chilling and cooking, with a section on management.

A pack only works if the business follows it and keeps it up to date. As a food handler, you may not write the system, but you carry it out every day.