What is HACCP and who has to work with it?
HACCP stands for Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points. It is a way of working in which you prevent food safety hazards instead of discovering them in the finished product. For each process step you look at what can go wrong, decide where intervention is really needed and record that you do it.
In the European Union, food businesses generally have to work according to HACCP principles. How extensive your plan must be depends on your activity and size. Sometimes you may use an approved hygiene code for your sector. Check the current rules with the NVWA and with your trade association.
What do you do before the hazard analysis?
Before you analyze hazards, you lay the foundation. Put together a small team from production, quality, maintenance and purchasing, because each sees different risks. Then describe for each product what is in it, how it is prepared, how long it keeps and how it is stored and used, including by vulnerable groups.
Next, draw the process flow diagram from receipt to dispatch and walk through it on site with the people who do the work. A diagram that is correct on paper but does not match the shop floor leads to a plan that nobody uses.
- A team with knowledge of the product and the process
- A product description with composition, shelf life and storage conditions
- The intended use and target group, for example vulnerable consumers
- A process flow diagram from receipt to dispatch
- A check of that diagram on the shop floor
Prerequisites: what do you arrange before choosing CCPs?
Prerequisites, in the trade often called prerequisite programs or PRPs, are the general hygiene measures underneath your plan: cleaning and disinfection, maintenance, pest control, personal hygiene, waste management, supplier management and training. They catch hazards that are not tied to one specific process step. Without this foundation, no HACCP plan holds up.
This means you do not have to turn every step into a critical point. A CCP is meant for a hazard that the prerequisites alone do not control sufficiently. If you work with ISO 22000 or a scheme based on it, you will also meet operational prerequisite programs (OPRPs): additional control measures with an action criterion instead of a critical limit.
Principle 1: which hazards can there be?
Go through every process step and ask what can enter, grow or survive. You distinguish four groups. Biological hazards are bacteria, viruses, molds and parasites. Chemical hazards include cleaning agents, lubricants and residues. Physical hazards are glass, metal, wood, plastic or bone fragments. Allergens get their own place, because they enter a product via raw materials and cross-contamination.
For each hazard, assess how likely it is and how serious the consequences are, and decide which hazards are significant. Note why you consider a hazard significant or not. An auditor or inspector wants to see that reasoning first.
Principles 2 and 3: CCPs and critical limits
A critical control point (CCP) is a step where you can prevent, eliminate or reduce a significant hazard to an acceptable level, and where you cannot catch it later in the process. A decision tree helps you reason consistently. If you end up with more than a handful of CCPs, check whether your prerequisites can carry part of the load.
Each CCP has a critical limit: a measurable value at which the product is still just safe, such as a minimum temperature, a maximum time, an acidity level or a dosage. You take the numbers from your applicable hygiene code, the legislation or your own validation, never from habit or from an example on the internet.
Principles 4 and 5: monitoring and taking action
Monitoring is the planned measuring or observing of whether a CCP is under control. Define in advance what you measure, how, how often and who does it. The result must be available quickly: a result after three days no longer helps if the product has already been delivered.
Also decide in advance what happens when a critical limit is exceeded. A corrective action has two parts: what you do with the product and what you do about the cause. Without agreements in advance, that turns into guessing in the rush of a production day. So define:
- Who stops the product immediately and who decides on reworking, other use or rejection
- How you determine which products were made since the last good measurement
- How you find and remove the cause, for example by repairing a malfunction
- Who records and closes the deviation and its handling
Principles 6 and 7: verification and record keeping
Verification answers the question of whether the plan is carried out as intended and keeps working. It includes calibrating measuring equipment, reviewing records periodically, carrying out internal audits, having samples tested and revising the plan when a product, recipe, process or supplier changes.
The seventh principle, documentation and record keeping, makes everything demonstrable. Keep the plan, the hazard analysis, the monitoring records, the deviations and the verification results, so you can show what you did at a given moment. Retention periods follow from your scheme, your customers and the law.
A small example: heat-treating chicken
Suppose you make ready meals with cooked chicken. In the hazard analysis you see that disease-causing bacteria can be present on raw meat. The heating step is where you kill them, and later in the process you cannot make up for it. That makes heating a CCP.
The critical limit is a minimum core temperature reached for a minimum time. Which numbers apply, you determine with your hygiene code, the regulations and your own validation; in this example we deliberately leave them out. You measure each batch with a calibrated core thermometer and record the result.
If a batch stays below the limit, you reheat it or reject it, and you find out why, for example an oven time that was too short or a faulty thermometer. Verification is the periodic calibration of the thermometer and a review of the records by someone other than the person who measured.
Common mistakes with a HACCP plan
Most HACCP plans do not fail in the analysis, but in daily use. The plan then remains a document for the audit, while the shop floor handles things differently. If you recognize these pitfalls, a small adjustment can often solve them:
- A plan copied from an example, without describing your own product and process
- Too many CCPs, so that monitoring becomes a formality
- Critical limits without justification or source
- Measuring equipment that is not calibrated, which makes the record worthless
- Not revising the plan after a new recipe, a new machine or a different supplier
How BrydgeOne supports this
In the HACCP & hazard analysis module you work on a food safety plan with CCPs and OPRPs. Allergen management helps you control the allergen matrix and cross-contamination, Traceability & recall supports drills, and Calibration & measuring equipment tracks the validity of your measuring equipment, such as the thermometer from the example.
© 2026 BrydgeOne. General information, not legal or other professional advice. No rights can be derived from this article.