HACCP: The key to food safety for food professionals
What is HACCP?
Ensuring food safety is a fundamental responsibility for all professionals in commercial and collective catering, as well as those in food trades such as bakers, butchers, fishmongers, and caterers.
You are accountable for the food you sell to your customers and must ensure its traceability from delivery to plate. Detecting potential health hazards falls under your jurisdiction. This is both an ethical duty and a strict legal requirement.
This is where the HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point) system becomes essential.
Food Law / HACCP: definition and origin
The Food Law
Established in 2006, the Food Law is a set of European regulations.
It sets hygiene standards to be applied in establishments that prepare, process, or store products of animal origin. Since 2006, all food industry professionals, without exception, must comply with the requirements of the Food Law by implementing a Sanitary Control Plan.
The Health Control Plan
The Health Control Plan is a register that lists all preventive and self-monitoring measures put in place by a food industry professional to ensure the safety of foodstuffs. Keeping this document up-to-date is essential and ensures compliance with Good Hygiene Practices and traceability.
It must include:
- Good hygiene practices: guidelines on staff hygiene, cleaning and disiwornfection plan, pest control, temperature control, maintenance, and water quality
- The Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) plan
- Management of non-compliant products and traceability
The HACCP Method
Developed in the 1960s at NASA’s request, the HACCP method was originally designed to ensure the food safety of astronauts. It is now applicable to all food industry professionals in France and the EU and has been mandatory for commercial catering since 1995.
HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point) is a method for analyzing and identifying hazards and critical control points, with the implementation of mandatory preventive and corrective actions to fully control them. For restaurateurs and artisans, the HACCP method allows you to evaluate and control the risks associated with the foodstuffs you serve or sell.
The key principles of food traceability
To fully comply with the HACCP method, you must ensure flawless traceability of all your products and all sensitive steps identified by the HACCP method.
What is traceability? It’s actually the journey of a food item from its original state to its consumption by the final customer.
In catering, its journey starts with the receipt of goods and ends with serving on the plate. For bakers, butchers, fishmongers…, the endpoint of product traceability is the sale or delivery to a customer.
In practical terms, what does food traceability look like?
- You must keep all your invoices and delivery notes for 5 years
- All your foodstuffs must be labeled: repackaged, manufactured, frozen, or thawed products
- Health information for the food sold or consumed must be retained
- Sensitive steps (receipt, storage, cooking, etc.) must be recorded
This traceability ensures the safety of the foodstuffs you serve or sell and that they represent no health risk to the consumer.
Additionally, there is a requirement for information on the origin of meat, allergens, and the storage of sample dishes in all collective catering for dishes served in portions of more than two.
ePackPro: your trusted partner for meeting hygiene regulations
Our digital traceability tool is designed and conceived by a restaurateur, fully aware of the various hygiene standards and the importance of complying with hygiene rules for the quality of products served to customers.
ePackPro integrates all regulatory obligations and helps you ensure your HACCP compliance while saving time.
Don’t stress! Simplicity is at your fingertips with ePackPro, by digitizing your traceability processes.
Overall, the obligations for food professionals are as follows:
- Implement a Health Control Plan adapted to their structure: write instructions and procedures to comply with Good Hygiene and Manufacturing Practices.
- Educate and train your teams so they can identify the various risks associated with food production and adhere to the established instructions.
- Record all your readings and self-monitoring, which will serve as proof of quality for your finished products
- Be able to show what control measures have been implemented to monitor the effectiveness of the Health Control Plan and quickly retrieve this information
- Be completely transparent about non-compliances: define corrective actions on operations, products, and analysis results, track them, and implement preventive actions to avoid recurrence.
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