Meat safety and hygiene

The Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) principles ensure the production of safe food.

HACCP is an internationally recognised system for food safety management. A food safety management system is a practical tool to control the food production environment. It helps you produce safe food by managing food safety, hygiene and processes to ensure the food produced is safe.

Food business operators must ensure that the food they produce is safe to eat. If you run a food business, then you must ensure you put in place effective food safety management procedures and working practices. You must be able to prove that you have done so.

To produce safe food for consumers, you must identify all food production safety hazards. You must then remove or reduce the hazards to an acceptable level. These food safety hazards may be biological, physical or chemical.

Seven HACCP principles

The HACCP system is recognised as the system for food safety management world-wide. It is a preventative approach to food safety based on the following seven principles:

1. Identify any hazards that you must prevent, remove or reduce to acceptable levels
2. Identify the critical control points (CCPs) at the step at which control is essential to prevent or remove a hazard or to reduce it to acceptable levels
3. Establish critical limits at CCPs
4. Establish procedures to monitor the CCPs
5. Establish corrective actions you need to take if a CCP is not under control
6. Establish procedures to verify whether the above procedures are working well
7. Establish documents and records to show the effective application of the above measures

Controlling hazards

The HACCP approach provides a systematic way of identifying food safety hazards and controlling them. This involves the following four steps:

• plan - decide what you need to do to ensure food safety and write it down
• do - carry out your plan of action to maintain food safety
• check - monitor your HACCP activity to check that you are doing what you planned to do to maintain food safety and record what has been checked and when
• act - take action when food safety is at risk and write it down

Small food businesses in the UK can use the Food Standard Agency’s MyHACCP tool (free of charge) to work through the process of developing a food safety management system based on HACCP principles.