Food Safety & HACCP Compliance
What is HACCP?
The HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point) system
of food safety management is detailed by the FSA (Food Standards
Agency) as the most effective way for food businesses to ensure
consumer protection.
The FSA believes that application of effective HACCP-based controls
across the food chain will help reduce food borne disease, and
is taking action to increase the awareness and application of
HACCP in UK food businesses.
The HACCP system is internationally accepted as the system of
choice for food safety management. It is a preventative approach
to food safety based on the following 7 principles:
- Analyze hazards. Potential hazards associated with a food
and measures to control those hazards are identified. The hazard
could be biological, such as a microbe; chemical, such as a
toxin; or physical, such as ground glass or metal fragments.
- Identify critical control points. These are points in a food's
production--from its raw state through processing and shipping
to consumption by the consumer--at which the potential hazard
can be controlled or eliminated. Examples are cooking, cooling,
packaging, and metal detection.
- Establish preventive measures with critical limits for each
control point. For a cooked food, for example, this might include
setting the minimum cooking temperature and time required to
ensure the elimination of any harmful microbes.
- Establish procedures to monitor the critical control points.
Such procedures might include determining how and by whom cooking
time and temperature should be monitored.
- Establish corrective actions to be taken when monitoring shows
that a critical limit has not been met--for example, reprocessing
or disposing of food if the minimum cooking temperature is not
met.
- Establish procedures to verify that the system is working
properly--for example, testing time-and-temperature recording
devices to verify that a cooking unit is working properly.
- Establish effective recordkeeping to document the HACCP system.
This would include records of hazards and their control methods,
the monitoring of safety requirements and action taken to correct
potential problems. Each of these principles must be backed
by sound scientific knowledge: for example, published microbiological
studies on time and temperature factors for controlling food
borne pathogens.
The History of HACCP
 In
the 1960s, the Pillsbury Corporation developed the HACCP control
system with NASA to ensure food safety for the first manned space
missions.
The HACCP system and guidelines for its application were defined
by the Codex Alimentarius Commission in the Codex Alimentarius
Code of Practice. This Commission implements the Joint Food and
Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations and World
Health Organisation (WHO) Food Standards Programme.
Following an outbreak of E. coli 0157 in Scotland in 1996, The
Pennington Report recommended that HACCP be adopted by all food
businesses to ensure food safety. HACCP principles were incorporated
into specific UK regulations, including those for the meat and
seafood industries.
The British Retail Consortium Technical Standard for Companies
Supplying Retailer Branded Food Products requires the adoption
of HACCP. Retailer branded products now represent over 50% of
all food sold in the UK.
The European Product Liability Directive (1985) introduced a
burden of proof on manufacturers in respect of defences of defective
product. It was noted that if best practices are not followed,
then manufacturers would be unlikely to make successful defences
in the event of liability claims.
The Food Safety Act 1990 states that it is an offence to:
- sell food which does not comply with food safety requirements
- render food injurious to health
- sell food which is not of the nature, substance or quality demanded
The Act describes a legal defence of ‘due diligence', which
enables someone to be acquitted of an offence if they can prove
that they ‘took all reasonable precautions and exercised
all due diligence to avoid committing that offence’. Offences
under the Act are liable to penalties of prison sentences of up
to 2 years and/or unlimited fines.
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