Transitioning from QA to HACCP: Enhancing Food Safety and Quality

Implementing a Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) program often reveals that many existing control programs can be adapted with minor modifications. However, the distinctions between a conventional quality assurance (QA) system and HACCP are significant, particularly in terms of the seven HACCP principles.

Quality Assurance
Most traditional QA programs are designed to discover problems rather than prevent them. These systems typically collect minimal detailed information on the production line for analysis. Verification procedures are seldom utilized beyond testing the final product, and few QA systems provide comprehensive instructions for handling out-of-specification products. This reactive approach can lead to inefficiencies and a lack of proactive measures to ensure product safety and quality.

HACCP
In contrast, HACCP systems prioritize the prevention of problems before they occur. This preventive approach is grounded in a highly structured and disciplined methodology that relies on accurate information and data collection. While HACCP programs can incorporate appropriate data and information from existing QA systems, their effectiveness hinges on starting with common approaches and similarities between the two systems.

The transition from conventional QA to HACCP does not typically require additional personnel. Instead, the major impacts of HACCP include:

1. Focusing Control Efforts on Critical Issues: HACCP emphasizes identifying and controlling the most significant hazards to food safety. By concentrating on critical control points, resources are utilized more efficiently, and the likelihood of serious issues is minimized.

2. Delegating Responsibility: Unlike traditional QA systems where responsibility often lies with a specific team, HACCP programs distribute control responsibilities across all personnel. This collective responsibility ensures a more comprehensive approach to maintaining safety and quality standards.

3. Enforcing Documentation and Action: HACCP mandates thorough documentation and prompt action. Detailed records of each step in the process are maintained, and corrective actions are clearly defined and implemented when deviations occur. This rigorous documentation supports continuous improvement and accountability throughout the production process.

The integration of QA and HACCP can significantly enhance a company's ability to ensure product safety and quality. By leveraging existing QA data and modifying control programs to align with HACCP principles, companies can achieve a more proactive and effective approach to food safety management.
Transitioning from QA to HACCP: Enhancing Food Safety and Quality

Incident Reporting in HACCP

HACCP is a tool for identifying what can go wrong to make food unsafe for human consumption and then deciding how it can be prevented.

Food incidents can have an impact on human health, undermine consumer confidence in the quality and safety of food and are costly to the company.

All deviations from the normal operations must be reported on a prearranged plan to selected people. Incident may range from a plant inspection by the government to a deviation in a CCP. An incident is defined as: Any event where, based on the information available, there are concerns about actual or suspected threats to the safety or quality of food that could require intervention to protect consumers’ interests.

It is not always possible for plant people to appreciate the enormity of a problem that might occur. The incident may not be a food safety problem; however, if the process continues to worsen, there might be a breakdown of the system that could lead to a food safety incidents.

An effective plan will help ensure compliance with legal requirements; provide a systematic assessment of incidents; manage and control serious incidents; and protect company assets, which include brand reputation.

Reporting of incidents also allows the review committee to have an overall view of how well the operations are functioning, depending on the incident rate.
Incident Reporting in HACCP

Contract manufacturing and product quality

The main issue related to contract production is the control over the quality and safety of the product.

Contract manufacturing must be adhering to the same requirements the contracting company requires of its plant, including implementation of HACCP. They must operate under the same rules and the same criteria.

After all, they are an extension of the companies manufacturing operations and should be treated no differently.

The required quality can be achieved through the definition of the product characteristics based on the recipe and processing conditions or though use of a contract manufacturer chosen because of the quality attributes of the products they produce.

The manufacturer who undertakes to carry out the manufacturing for the contract giver must be in possession of adequate premises and equipment, knowledge and experience. She or he should also have at his/her disposal comment personnel.

The contract manufacturer is responsible for ensuring that all products or materials delivered to him/her are suitable for their intended purpose.
Contract manufacturing and product quality

Caterers should adopt HACCP

Caterers should adopt HACCP
Caterer, large and small. usually have a vast number of raw materials and a high turnover of staff.

The principle of HACCP remain very relevant to this environment, however, and the implementation may begun with the use of a simple process flow diagram.

With reasonable understanding of the basic rules of food safety and hygiene, it should be possible to consider what might go wrong at each of the steps in the process.

Adopting good hygiene practice within the catering environment at all times will be an essential ongoing requirement in order to ensure that the HACCP approach will add real value and that food safety management is enhance.

Although not all caterers will have the in-depth technical knowledge to conduct what some might refer to as real HACCP study. An attempt to understand and adopt the HACCP Principles should make significant improvement to the level of food safety control possible.

The output of the studies may look less technical, the Critical Limits may not have been established through in-depth testing, but with certain degree of external; support, a simple but effective, HACCP Plan can be put in place.

Many catering organizations already adopted the HACCP system of food safety management to identify, monitor, and control contamination risks and hazards associated with food-borne illness.
Caterers should adopt HACCP.

The hazards include the biological, chemical and physical properties that may cause contamination, and the critical control points are those points , steps or procedures during which a food safety hazard can be prevented, eliminated or reduced.
Caterers should adopt HACCP

HACCP Programs

HACCP programs should be strictly related to food safety.

Critical Control Points should only be used to control those points in a process where lack of control will likely result in the development of a potential safety hazard.

They should not be used to control non hazardous situations which are of serious regulatory, consumer or economic consequence.

Too much monitoring (i.e. inclusion of non-hazardous points) will dilutes out the HACCP effort, resulting in nothing being monitored or the wrong points being monitored.

There will be then no insurance that the product being release meets all safety requirements and therefore, a potential hazard may be delivered to consumers.

Non-safety related monitoring procedures should be part of a standard quality assurance programs.
HACCP Programs

Cost Effective of HACCP

HACCP is widely recognized in the food industry as an effective approach to establishing good production, sanitation and manufacturing practices that produce safe foods.

After the initial setting up of the system, be extremely cost effective.

First by building the controls into the process, failure can be identified at an early stage and therefore less finished product will be rejected at the end of the production line. It will prevent of waste and incident costs.

Secondly, by identifying the Critical Control Points, a limited technical resource can be targeted at the management of these.

Thirdly the disciplines of applying HACCP are such that there is almost always going to be improvement in product quality. Adequate training of personnel is a key to effective implementation of the HACCP system.

HACCP entails extensive planning, commitment of resources and new transaction disciplines - monitoring, cord keeping, audit/verification procedures and trend analysis techniques.

Consumer awareness of their right to purchase food that is safe has increase significantly over the past few years.

Here the controls used to prevent the presence of a harmful contaminant, such as glass are so often likely also to prevent the occurrence of less harmful contaminant, therefore providing brand quality protection as well as consumer protection.

An effective HACCP based product safety will include statement that: designate product safety as a top business priority.
Cost Effective of HACCP

The Principles of HACCP

The Principles of HACCP
The HACCP system consist of seven principles which outline how to establish, implement, and maintain a HACCP plan for the operation under study.

The HACCP Principles have international acceptance and details of this approach have been published by the Codex Alimentarius Commission and the National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods.

Principle 1
Conduct a hazard analysis. Prepare list of steps in the process, identify where significant could occur and describe the control measures.

Principle 1 describes where the HACCP Team should start. A Process Flow Diagram is put together detailing all the steps in the process from incoming raw materials to finished product. When complete the HACCP team identifies all the hazards that could occur at each stage establish the risk to determine the significant hazards and describes measures for their control. These may be existing or new control measures.

Principle 2
Determine the Critical Control Points (CCPs). When all the hazards and control measures have been described, the HACCP Team establishes the points here control is critical to assuring the safety of the product. These are the Critical Control Points of CCPs.

Principle 3
Establish Critical Limits for control measures associated with each identified CCP. The Critical Limits describe the difference between safe and unsafe product at the CCPs. They must involve a measurable parameter and may also be known as the absolute tolerance or safety limit for the CCP.

Principle 4
Establish a system to monitor control of the CCP. The HACCP Team should specify monitoring requirements for management of the CCP within its Critical Limits. This will involve specifying monitoring actions along with monitoring frequency and responsibility.

In addition, procedures will need to be established to adjust the process and maintain control according to the monitoring results.

Principle 5
Establish the corrective actions to be taken when monitoring indicates that a particular CCP is not under control. Corrective action procedures and responsibilities for their implementation need to be specified.

This will include action to bring the process back under control and action to deal with product manufactured while the process was out of control.

Principle 6
Establish procedures for verification to confirm that the HACCP System is working correctly. Verification procedures must be developed to maintain the HACCP System and ensure that it continues to work effectively.

Principle 7
Establish documentation concerning all procedures and records appropriate to these principle and their application. Records must be kept to demonstrate that the HACCP System is operating under control and that appropriate corrective action has been taken for any deviations from the Critical Limits.

This will provides evidence of safe product manufacture.
The Principles of HACCP

Managing safety and quality

In practice, private management of quality and safety is increasingly complex and intertwined. There is a growing of process control approaches from farm to table in food production for industrial country markets.

Among all food enterprise, the large food retailer, eager to portray their industry as trustworthy, are tending to take greater responsibility for the safety of the food they sells.

The management of safety of a subset of more general quality management. Evaluation of food quality requires standards for each product served and a systematic process for evaluating food items to see that standards were met.

The Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points (HACCP) system is used to address hazards that can be introduced at different points in the food chain or are difficult to measure.

The HACCP system focuses on prevention and control of hazards, rather than on end product testing.

It made its way into food system area and has continued as the standard for keeping food safe to consume.
An advantage of HACCP is to focus resources on the most important control pints, which can minimize resources used to improve safety.

HACCP’s main thrust is identifying critical control points that could affect quality or safety or f the food during procurement, processing and delivery of the finished food products and providing standards for each.

Properly applied, HACCP may lead to process redesign, which can reduce the cost of providing quality.

However assessment of food quality is not only a system selection question but a continuous quality improvement.

The acceptance of food by customer is the ultimate measure of quality. The customer interested in the quality of the product not the type of food production system.
Managing safety and quality

What is HACCP?

HACCP is widely recognized in the food industry as an effective approach good production, sanitation and manufacturing practices safe foods.

It was developed nearly 35 years ago for astronauts, the FDA intends to eventually use it for much of the United States food supply.

The program for astronauts focuses on preventing hazards that could cause food borne illnesses by applying science-based controls, from raw material to finished products.

HACCP systems establish process control though identifying points in the production process that are most critical to monitor and control.

It provides feedback to direct corrective actions. HACCP’s preventive focus is seen as more cost effective than testing a product and them destroying or reworking it.

The system can be applied to control at any stage in the food system.

By focusing inspection at CCPs, HACCP improves the scientific basis for safety and control processes.

A CCP is “any point in the chain of food production from raw materials to finished product where the loss of control result in unaccepted food safety risk”.

Critical control points (CCP) may be located at any pint in the food production and manufacturing system for a food product where hazards need to be either prevented, elimination or reduce acceptable levels.

Monitoring of CCPs is done best by using indicators that can be measured easily. This focus on measurable indicators provides a more cost-effective approach to control than product sampling and testing, which is expensive and may not provide timely results.

CCP’s must be carefully developed and documented. They must be used only for purposes of product safety or where use must be justified by the critical nature of the CCP.

This especially important food borne ,microbial pathogens, because their incidence is low and costs of testing are high.

Effective control mechanisms are put in place to ensure that then the potential failure are prevented from occurring.

The second type of regulation coming into wider use is food product labeling to indicate potential hazards or methods of food production.

This allow consumers who are at higher risks to choose safer products or to prepare food so as to avoid risk.

The original system was pioneered by the Pillsbury Company working alongside NASA and the US Army Laboratories at Natick.

It was based on the engineering system, Failure, Mode, and Effect Analysis, which looks at what could potentially go wrong at each stage in an operation together with possible causes and the likely effect.

The first comprehensive treatise on HACCP published in 1973 by the Pillsbury Company, was used to train FDA inspectors in HACCP principles during promulgation of the successful federal sealed containers.
What is HACCP?

Contrasting Quality Assurance and Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) system

Most company that start Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point program are pleasantly surprised to find many of the control programs already in place can, with modification, be utilize directly. However, there are major differences between a conventional quality assurance (QA) system and HACCP as it is now conceived in term of seven principles.

Quality Assurance. Most Quality Assurance programs are designed to discover rather than prevent problems. Little detailed information is collected on line to be used fro analysis. Verification procedures the system are not generally used other than testing the end product, and very few QA system include detailed instructions on what to do if product is out f specifications.

HACCP. HACCP systems are based on the prevention of problems rather than discovery after the fact. Each comprises a highly structured and disciplined approach to control, which depends on accurate information and data collection. Appropriate data and other information that the QA programs have will be used, however. The effective way to bring the two together is to start with their similarities and common approaches.

In converting from conventional QA to HACCP, it is generally no necessary to add personal to the program. The major effect of HACCP is to:

*Focus the control effort on the important issues

*Delegate responsibility

*Enforce documentation and action Under HACCP programs every one is responsible for control, not just the QA system and its personnel.
Contrasting Quality Assurance and Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) system