HACCP stands for hazard analysis and critical control points. A food safety plan helps you identify potential hazards in your operation, determine the controls you need to prevent or minimize those hazards, and verify that those controls are working as intended. Using a HACCP plan makes it easier for your food business to identify, prevent and manage food safety risks in your production process. A CCP is any point in a process where something could go wrong (like spoilage) because of the way you handle food products.
Your HACCP Plan & Critical Control Points (CCPs)
A HACCP plan (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points) is a system that dictates how you monitor, control, and track food safety from the time it enters your kitchen to the time it leaves your restaurant. In this article, we’ll discuss what a HACCP plan is and how it can benefit your business.
What Is a HACCP Plan? What is a CCP?
A HACCP plan is a document that outlines all of the critical control points in your facility. A critical control point is any step in food production where an error could cause foodborne illness or injury. For example: if someone dropped raw chicken on the floor and then put it back into storage for later use without properly cleaning or sanitizing it first, that would be considered an error at one of their critical control points because there were bacteria present on their hands or clothing which they transferred onto their other products while handling them—resulting in potential contamination when others consumed those products later on down the line as well as making them sick themselves due to ingesting something contaminated with bacteria like salmonella).
What is a Food Safety Hazard or Biological, Chemical or Physical Agent?
A food safety hazard is a biological, chemical, or physical agent in, or added to food that may cause illness or injury. Food safety hazards can be natural or man-made. They are present either in raw materials, ingredients, the environment, and/or the processing environment.
Food safety hazards can be a result of:
● The organisms (bacteria) causing illness through poisoning (pathogenic bacteria) and infections (non-pathogenic bacteria). These pathogens include salmonella, E-coli and campylobacter.
● Poisonous plants like mushrooms that grow on trees as well as poisonous fish such as puffer fish contain tetrodotoxin which is lethal when consumed by humans with no antidote available to neutralize its effects once ingested!
Learn the basics of critical control points (CCPs).
Critical control points (CCPs) are points in the process where hazards can be controlled to minimize the risk of foodborne illness. These points are used to identify and control the most likely causes of foodborne illness.
CCP’s focus on prevention, not detection. They’re not a monitoring system; they’re a way of thinking about HACCP as something you do with your entire operation, instead of just at one point in time. That’s why CCPs are so useful—they help you look at your whole system, determine where problems might arise, and then take measures to correct them before they become an issue for consumers.
In the end, your HACCP plan is only as good as the critical control points that you choose to include. So, make sure to consider all of the factors that affect food safety when determining which points are most important for your business.