Prepare for a food safety audit using HACCP standards

If you work in the food and beverage industry, your business depends on your ability to pass a food safety audit. In this article, we'll explain the three pillars of the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) system, so you know what to expect and how to achieve HACCP certification. 

Food safety:

In very simple terms, food safety refers to the production of food and beverages that are safe for consumption. Because food safety is a matter of public health, there are strong regulations in place to prevent contaminated food from reaching the market. These include regularly conducting a food safety audit at certain businesses. 

Understanding HACCP:

According to the FDA, HACCP is a method of analyzing and controlling any hazards that are part of a production process, from raw material production to manufacturing, distribution, and consumption.

HACCP creates different checkpoints along this process to check for biological, chemical and physical risks. This allows you to run a food safety audit at different points in the product's lifecycle, using rigorous HACCP certification standards to monitor for contamination throughout a product's lifecycle. 

Here are the seven major concepts of the HACCP certification process:

1. Hazard Analysis: This refers to analyzing and recording any hazards food faced during the manufacturing, packaging, or shipping processes.   
2. Identifying Critical Control Points (CCPs): There are some points in the food production process that are particularly risky for food safety. These are known as CCPs, and might include external factors like employee contamination or polluted air. CCPs require extra attention during a food safety audit. 
3. Defining critical limit values: in addition to preventing hazards, food safety requires us to define safe limits. These are usually set by the FDA or other governing bodies.   
4. Set up surveillance measures: A thorough analysis of your food safety measures won't be possible if you don't have methods in place to monitor for contamination. 
5. Determine corrective actions: You must have contingency plans in place, even if you are confident in your food safety methodology. Document your protocols and make sure they are ready to be put into action at a moment's notice.  
6. Embed verification measures: Once you've identified verification measures to eliminate the risk of contamination, you must embed them into your production process. You can leave no room for error. 
7. Documenting the measures taken: Make sure you document your processes so that you can perform analysis when something goes wrong. With the right documentation, you'll know what happened, when it happened, who was involved, and how it can be prevented the future. 

When it comes to a food safety audit, there are three areas that business owners should be thinking about: 

1. Hygiene in the production area 
2. Employee training 
3. Diligent documentation 

Here's how each of these plays a role in HACCP certification: 

Employee training 

To achieve HACCP certification, every member of your staff should go through extensive training that covers: 

• Standards of personal hygiene 
• Bathroom hygiene 
• Safe usage of kitchen equipment
• How to handle perishable food
• How to correctly wear protective clothing 
• No jewelry on the production floor 

Diligent documentation 

Documenting the processes you put in place may seem like an unnecessary burden, but it's just as essential as the other pillars on this list. 

When it comes time to conduct a food safety audit, your documentation will be vital to help inspectors understand whether you've been following protocol. These must be live documents, routinely updated to ensure they are practical and maintained throughout production, from storage to shipping. 

It takes a lot of work to meet HACCP standards. Now, imagine if all your hard work was stymied by poor air quality in your workplace!  

If you don't take clean air into account, all of your efforts to improve food safety could be fruitless. Without an air purification system in place, dust particles, gases, germs, viruses, and other harmful materials will make their way into your products, no matter what other measures you've taken. 

There's no better way to solve your clean air issues than with a professional air purification system from Zehnder Clean Air Solutions. Our air purifiers provide maximum hygiene, while also improving productivity and reducing cleaning and maintenance bills.