Are you starting your HACCP journey? Writing a HACCP plan or preparing for the audit can require a lot of research, and it’s always confusing, as HACCP includes many aspects, stages, and rules.
Don’t worry, you won’t get lost! We’ve researched for you and compiled everything into a well-detailed HACCP plan guide where you’ll find everything you need to know.
What Is a HACCP Plan?
A HACCP plan is a written document that outlines how a food business identifies, evaluates, and controls food safety hazards using the principles of Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP).
It includes a step-by-step assessment of the production process, highlights where risks may occur, and defines the preventive actions and monitoring procedures used to ensure food safety. Each plan is unique to the product and facility it covers, and it is required for compliance with many national and international food safety regulations.
Why Do You Need a HACCP Plan?
Although the HACCP plan is sometimes voluntary, some factors to consider include its benefits, business development, and legal requirements.
First and foremost, food safety is the most essential reason for having a HACCP plan. It helps identify and mitigate risks, ensuring the safety of consumers. As a result, your clients are healthy and satisfied.
You will improve your product quality, encouraging customers to return, making your business increasingly reliable.
The FDA made implementing HACCP compulsory within specific food and beverage industry branches. It is described in the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), which came into force in 2011.
The FDA’s primary goal is to prevent foodborne illnesses rather than deal with them afterward. The HACCP plan is the best way to adhere to these principles. So, once you have a program, you can be safe from legal issues, fines, and other problems.
A HACCP plan will regulate the working process. The employees will know how to deal with their tasks correctly and how to reach the highest quality of the product.
A HACCP plan saves you money. If your production is safe and compliant, you reduce the risk of recalls, losing customers, reputation problems, and dealing with even more severe issues. Consequently, you save money, reduce waste, and enhance efficiency.
What happens when a company demonstrates its commitment to food safety? It attracts more customers, partners, and investors and becomes a strong competitor in the market. Also, HACCP facilitates access to export markets that often require a HACCP certification.
Once you implement your HACCP plan, you will constantly work on improving it, as it requires regular updates. The more you strengthen your HACCP plan, the safer and higher-quality your product will be.
Another important aspect is that a HACCP plan is essential to different third-party audits, such as SQF, BRC, and others. If you want to pass any of the GFSI-recognized certifications, you won’t move further without a HACCP plan.
Overall, a HACCP plan can only benefit your company and ensure many prospects for your business in the long run.
How to Create a HACCP Plan?
With this clear, sequential approach, you will learn how to develop a comprehensive Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points (HACCP) plan. Ensure food safety by identifying potential hazards, establishing critical control points, and implementing effective monitoring procedures.
Assemble Your HACCP Team
To build and execute your HACCP plan, you need staff educated in HACCP principles. The staff you choose for this first HACCP plan step needs to have technical knowledge of your food preparation or production and of the chemical, biological, and physical hazards present at your facility or restaurant.
With FoodReady’s Enterprise solution, we can create your HACCP plan and help you set up your HACCP software at your business. We can also arrange a site visit for an extra charge if you need our HACCP consultant to visit your facility.
Describe Your Product, Intended Consumer, and Distribution
For demonstration purposes, our product is ready-to-eat salsa.
- Product Description — Ready-to-eat unpasteurized tomato-based salsa. It will be stored in cold cases and refrigerated display cases.
- Intended Consumer — Our consumer is likely between the ages of 2 and 70. It is unknown if our consumer is of robust or fragile health. Our product will be sold at convenience stores, delis, and grocery stores.
- Distribution — Our salsa will be shipped to retailers in refrigerated trucks.
Describe Your Food Process
- Pre-approve and verify suppliers.
- Receive ingredients from suppliers. Check delivery trucks and supplies for contamination, dirt, insects, spoilage, and general condition.
- Perishable ingredients are put into cold storage. Shelf-stable ingredients are stored in the warehouse.
- Prepare Salsa (chopping, mixing, etc.)
- Package and Label Salsa
- Pack salsa into boxes
- Boxes are put into cold storage.
- Load boxes onto refrigerated trucks.
(Most processes will also include various sanitation and standard operating procedures)
Develop a Simple Flow Chart of Your Food Process
This should illustrate a clear and simple outline of every step from receiving the ingredients to distributing the finished product.
FoodReady food safety software has a drag-and-drop HACCP flow chart builder and a library of over seventy Food Safety / HACCP plan examples for GFSI, SQF, GMP, USDA, FDA, Local Health, and Retail compliance.
Simply choose the template that most closely resembles your food product and customize the HACCP steps to your process.
We have a video knowledge base to help you learn this process, or you can hire one of FoodReady’s food safety consultants, such as an SQF Consultant, GMP Consultant, GFSI Consultant, or FDA Consultant, to build your HACCP plan for you.
Analyze the Flow Chart With Your HACCP Team
Your HACCP team then needs to verify that the HACCP flow chart you created is correct and that there are no missing steps in your food production process. Any corrections to your process are made at this time before implementation.
Once you finish these steps, you have to apply the 7 HACCP principles.
Those will be the next steps in developing a HACCP plan.
BUILD A HACCP PLAN IN MINUTES
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The 7 Principles of HACCP
These seven HACCP principles are the cornerstone of a HACCP plan and must be completed correctly.
HACCP Principle #1 – Perform a Hazard Analysis
The hazard analysis is the step where the HACCP team scrutinizes the production process and documents where and how any hazards can be introduced to the food process. Food safety hazards are either biological, chemical, or physical. HACCP principle #1 is perhaps the most important step in writing an HACCP plan because it identifies food hazards that can make your customer sick.
For instance, if you are working with raw meat, biological hazards like E. coli and Salmonella bacteria can contaminate it. Any surface or equipment that comes into contact with raw meat could have these biological hazards, and they need to be controlled to keep your customers from getting food poisoning.
Machinery used at certain points of the process could introduce a physical hazard, such as metal shards, which pose a danger to your customer and must be addressed in your HACCP plan.
Allergens, such as shellfish, fish, peanuts, tree nuts, soy, sesame, dairy, wheat, and eggs, are a significant food hazard.
Any food allergen in your product must be included on the food label, so the consumer can protect themselves if they have an intolerance or allergy to an ingredient.
Note steps in your food process that could introduce allergens. Allergens must also be carefully stored and used so they don’t cause cross-contamination.
Any step in your process that introduces chemicals (such as equipment sanitizer) to the process or machinery needs to be noted.
In the hazard analysis, your entire process, from receiving the ingredients to delivering them to your customer, must be evaluated.
To ensure the safety of the ingredients you receive, your suppliers must have a functioning food safety system, such as a HACCP, PC, or GMP certification.
Having pre-qualified suppliers or ingredients and packaging is a PRP (pre-requisite program) that most manufacturers have in place.
A PRP is any program that you have to help ensure the safety of your product before your process begins.
After the hazards are identified, the HACCP team must evaluate the severity of each possible hazard, how much it could harm the consumer, and the likelihood of this hazard occurring.
For instance, if Listeria is found in baby formula, it’s an enormous risk because it directly threatens the health of infants. This is an example of a food safety problem that causes a very severe hazard to a sensitive population.
As for the likelihood of occurrence, it’s much more likely that a product like packaged lettuce, which has a lot of moisture, would have more bacterial growth than a pre-cooked product and then frozen.
Once you have made the list of hazards, you must list the “controls” you can use to eliminate or reduce them.
For example, if your product is packaged lettuce, the lettuce would be washed in a solution to control the growth of bacteria. If your product is pre-cooked frozen hamburger patties, the patties would be cooked to a specific temperature for a certain amount of time to kill pathogenic bacteria that could harm your customers.
After identifying all the hazards, apply them to your flow chart at the appropriate steps.
HACCP Principle #2 – Determine Critical Control Points
Now that you know which hazards could be the most detrimental to the health of your consumer and which are the most likely to occur, you need to determine at which point in your process you can control the hazard by eliminating it or reducing it to acceptable standards. These are called Critical Control Points.
In our ready-to-eat salsa example, there is a CCP at the final step, “serving at a cold bar.” If the salsa’s temperature rises above a certain level, biological pathogens can grow.
HACCP Principle #3 – Establish Critical Limits
Critical limits are the maximum and minimum levels needed to achieve control over the hazards at each CCP.
For instance, you may need to cook food to a specific temperature for some time to kill biological pathogens. These parameters must be listed at each critical control point.
For example, salsa must be kept at or below a minimum temperature of 40℉ according to the FDA to control bacterial growth.
HACCP Principle #4 – Establish Monitoring Procedures
There must be a way to monitor whether hazards were controlled or stopped at the critical control point. Examples of monitoring could be logging the times and temperatures needed to kill pathogens, swabbing for pathogen identification on sanitized equipment, testing the magnets used to detect metal in food to ensure they are working properly, and other measures.
As monitoring measures are performed, the staff responsible for monitoring must document and record their actions in monitoring logs. These monitoring logs must be maintained and available for retrieval for audit and inspection purposes.
HACCP Principle #5 – Establish Corrective Actions
This step is needed when a hazard is not controlled correctly at the CCP.
For example, let’s say one of the HACCP team members uses their Bluetooth thermometer and discovers that the salsa temperature is at 50℉, which is above the 40℉ maximum temperature. In this case, the corrective action would be to dispose of the salsa to prevent people from eating food that could have biological contamination.
HACCP Principle #6 – Establish Verification Procedures
Firstly, the initial HACCP plan must be verified for validity by HACCP-trained individuals. This is often done through HACCP plan validation, which confirms that the control measures are scientifically sound and effective before implementation. For example, if cooking at a certain temperature is needed to kill pathogens, the oven temperature must be verified to ensure the proper temperature is obtained.
If the HACCP plan is verified and followed precisely, corrective actions are less likely to be needed later, resulting in safer food and a reduction in costs.
Verification procedures are in place so that when the HACCP system fails, compromised food can be targeted and dealt with in a manner that protects the consumer.
Additionally, the HACCP plan needs to be verified occasionally by an unbiased third-party auditor to ensure the HACCP is being followed correctly.
HACCP Principle #7- Establish Record Keeping and Documentation
An important part of a HACCP plan is recording all actions associated with it and maintaining these documents in a way that is easily accessible.
This means that the HACCP plan itself, as well as any corrective actions, monitoring, and verification, are documented and retrievable for audits, recalls, food traceability, labeling, batch management, training logs, etc.
FDA’s Food Safety Modernization Act rule 204 requires food manufacturers to have food recall plans in place, ensure food traceability, and keep records.
In the past, this meant maintaining binders of documents to present during inspections and wading through them when a recall needed to happen. FoodReady AI can build your HACCP plan, create your food safety system, and your process ready for any 3rd-party audit like SQF, BRC, GMP, GFSI, and the Costco Audit.
See How HACCP Plans Work in Real Food Businesses
Now that you’ve learned the seven principles of HACCP, you might wonder how they work in a real-world plan. Reviewing examples from various food categories can help clarify how critical control points, limits, monitoring procedures, and corrective actions are applied to different products and production methods.
Whether you work with animal proteins, packaged foods, ready-to-eat meals, or specialty items, these HACCP plan examples provide actionable insight into how the process works across diverse industries:
- Poultry Products HACCP Plan: Includes temperature control and pathogen management for raw and cooked chicken.
- Beef HACCP Plan: Focuses on E. coli reduction and sanitary handling during grinding or slicing.
- Sushi HACCP Plan: Highlights freezing for parasite control and cold chain integrity.
- Juice HACCP Plan: Addresses FDA Juice HACCP regulation and acidification procedures.
- Dairy HACCP Plan: Details pathogen control in pasteurization and storage of milk products.
- Sausage HACCP Plan: Manages thermal processing and cross-contamination risks in mixed-meat processing.
- Vegetables HACCP Plan: Includes washing steps, cold storage, and pathogen controls for fresh produce.
- Baked Goods HACCP Plan: Covers allergen controls and temperature-based baking steps.
- Coffee HACCP Plan: Focuses on dry processing, metal detection, and sanitation in roasting environments.
- Honey HACCP Plan: Addresses filtration, storage, and packaging hazards in natural sweetener processing.
- Distribution HACCP Plan: Useful for cold chain and temperature-controlled logistics.
- Chocolate HACCP Plan: Manages melting, tempering, and allergen segregation in confectionery.
- HACCP Plan for Restaurants & Catering: Covers multi-ingredient prep and diverse critical points in foodservice settings.
- Reduced Oxygen Packaging (ROP) HACCP Plan: Focuses on anaerobic hazard prevention for vacuum-packaged foods.
- Cannabis Edibles HACCP Plan: Helps processors align with food safety and dosage control in infused products.
You can explore the full library of HACCP plan templates to find the one that best aligns with your product type and compliance goals. The FoodReady HACCP builder customizes each plan, making it easy to adapt validated safety processes to your unique facility.
With a clearer understanding of how these principles work in action, you’re ready to implement, including building your prerequisite programs, SOPs, and team training.
HACCP Plan Implementation
By implementing these stages, you and your team will write and incorporate a successful HACCP plan and achieve the highest possible level of food safety.
HACCP implementation is an intricate process and requires a lot of determination. The FDA provides the guidelines to help apply the HACCP principles and write a sophisticated HACCP plan.
Prerequisite Programs
Take care of the prerequisite programs. This is an essential requirement for creating a good HACCP plan. PRPs can create an acceptable environment and operating conditions for hazard-free, safe food production.
These environmental requirements can be indicated in state and local codes, standards, and guidelines, like cGMP (Current Good Manufacturing Practices).
Prerequisite programs are developed and incorporated separately from the HACCP plan. However, some aspects, such as equipment maintenance and settings, can still be managed within the plan.
Prerequisite programs include an abundance of factors. Let’s look at some of them:
- Your facilities have to be built according to the principles of sanitary design.
- Your supplier must be reliable and have GMP and food safety programs.
- Maintain the equipment according to the established hygienic standards.
- Implement effective sanitation practices.
- The personal hygiene of employees has to be controlled.
- Traceability and recall procedures have to be well-organized, etc.
Standard Operating Procedures
One crucial prerequisite for HACCP implementation is the establishment, documentation, and execution of Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs).
SOPs are detailed written guidelines indicating how to perform routine tasks that directly influence food safety.
Every Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) should cover aspects like monitoring, documentation, corrective measures, and periodic assessment. Following SOPs will help monitor and prevent potential hazards.
Also, it is an effective way to keep the employees aware of how to perform their work.
These manuals must be easy to read and regularly updated. They can be presented in different formats, such as steps, flowcharts, or diagrams.
FoodReady AI has everything you need for effective SOPs. Our AI SOP generator will easily create SOPs in no time. We will help keep your SOPs compliant and up-to-date, as you can track changes, control, and restore previous document versions.
HACCP Training for Employees
You must always know what you are dealing with. That’s why HACCP training for management and employees is a key to a successful HACCP plan.
The HACCP team must be well-educated and equipped to develop, implement, and update the plan. The training should include modules that cover the work with CCPs.
Once you and your team are educated enough to work with the HACCP system and the well-established prerequisite programs, you are ready to develop and implement the plan.
The HACCP system will remain effective if you stick to planned verification procedures and maintain the plan when required. But remember that the program won’t work unless the staff know their role and responsibilities. Their input is invaluable.
Getting Your HACCP Certified
Once you have developed and implemented your HACCP plan, you can get your HACCP plan certified.
A HACCP certification is a document that proves that you have developed a great HACCP plan and efficiently implemented it into your food safety management. If you are a food manufacturer or anyone who deals with food at different phases of the supply chain, HACCP certification will be an advantage.
The procedure and the preparation will include some of the steps you are already familiar with.
Work on perfecting your prerequisite programs. Then, develop, improve, and implement your HACCP plan.
1. Perform a Gap Analysis.
Gap assessment is an excellent preparation before the actual audit. Check all the processes to identify the gaps and areas for improvement so that you are entirely prepared for the auditor’s inspection. It’s always better to involve an unbiased third person. That will help make the preparation more efficient.
As an example of preparation, you can conduct random temperature measurements and organize and check whether the documents are easily retrievable, updated, and organized. You can also follow and include the latest food safety updates in your food safety management system.
2. Hire a 3rd-Party Auditor.
Choose a verified third-party auditor. These auditors are trained to thoroughly review the entire organization and confirm that it adheres to the established food safety standards.
The HACCP certification routine can be time-consuming, but it is definitely worth it. The audit itself will take approximately five days to complete. The rest will depend on your certification goals, current workflow state, company’s size, etc.
3. Pass your HACCP Audit and maintain your result.
It’s time to pass the HACCP audit and get certified. After successful certification, you are responsible for keeping your results, as a HACCP plan requires constant implementation and continuous improvement.
HACCP certificates need to be renewed within a specific period, which depends on the decision of the auditor you choose. In the next two years, you will have an announced or unannounced surveillance audit to verify if you still adhere to the HACCP standards.
You should also know that you risk revoking your certification if your company breaches the HACCP requirements.
In general, once you get HACCP certified, you must be responsible enough to improve your food safety and maintain your achievements.Don’t forget that our HACCP consultants can help you get HACCP certified quickly and easily.
Common Mistakes When Working With the HACCP Plan
The HACCP process can be challenging, making it essential to recognize and avoid common mistakes.
First and foremost, generalized and irregular checkups can pose a problem. Various processes and facilities can hide different hazards. It is essential to check everything in detail and constantly, so you maintain a steady checking routine. But remember that everything has to be in moderation; overly simple or intricate reviews can be harmful.
Companies need to pay attention to prerequisite programs and prioritize training and preventative maintenance so they can identify hazards before they are introduced into the production process.
Another problem is neglecting reviews. They are usually associated with the audits; however, the HACCP plan must also be reviewed in other cases. For instance, when there are changes in the legislation, or you modify a recipe.
In general, ignoring or underestimating some of the compulsory steps or prerequisite programs can lead to issues with developing and implementing the HACCP system into the business.
FoodReady software and consulting will help you do everything right the first time.See how our customers have flourished with our HACCP and 3rd-party audit help.
FoodReady AI will assist you with your HACCP Plan.
FoodReady AI strives to help food companies manage and digitize food safety compliance.
Our software has an AI HACCP builder with over eighty customizable HACCP templates to fit your business needs.
Use FoodReady’s task manager or AI-powered checklist builder to make your quality and operational tracking tasks more efficient and optimized. This simplifies the transition for organizations seeking to replace their manual spreadsheet systems.
You will also track biological, physical, and chemical hazards in a database and work with CCP logs with Bluetooth thermometer integration.
With FoodReady AI, you will feel confident about traceability and recall, monitoring, correction, verification procedures, and other significant steps needed for your HACCP plan.We also offer consulting services, and our HACCP consultants will gladly assist you.
FAQs
Kill steps are those that you need to do to eliminate the bacteria. These can be cooking, freezing, pasteurization, and others. Read our guide to learn more about kill step in the HACCP plan.
Implementing HACCP can be an intricate, demanding, time, and money-consuming process. However, if you make sure your company can handle that, this is a worthy investment.
No, HACCP can fit other industries apart from food and beverage. For example, it can be cosmetics or pharmaceuticals.
Apart from the primary rules of HACCP, you should also learn how to align with regional standards, customize plans, and train your staff based on regional peculiarities.
Don’t forget about risk assessment to discover potential risks. Follow the international guidelines like those established in Codex Alimentarius.
Your HACCP plan should be reviewed whenever there is a change in your process, when there is a trend in poor food safety outcomes, and also periodically, some companies review their HACCP plan annually and others review their plans more frequently.
A digital HACCP system works much more efficiently for many reasons:
First and foremost, who wants to keep binders and binders full of papers that have to be waded through. A digital cloud based system removes the onus of the room full of papers.
Second, employees can document their actions in FoodReady’s mobile app which will help keep them compliant.
Third, you can take and log photos for visual verification, link to a Bluetooth thermometer for temperature controls.
Fourth, you can easily share your logs with inspectors.
Fifth, you can easily edit your HACCP when changes occur.
Sixth, your HACCP plan also links to your batch management, your supply of ingredients, your recall plan, etc. FoodReady is your food safety solution.
FoodReady’s HACCP writers are certified and have years of real world HACCP and food safety experience. We use our software to write your HACCP plan, where you can record and keep any associated SOPs, PCs, time and temperature logs, etc.
