This is the initial step in the process and involves analysing your food supply chain for potential physical, chemical, or biological hazards. Something is considered a hazard when it may be considered harmful or unsafe for human consumption.

By actively recording the hazards within your businesses processes, you’re able to put controls in place to mitigate the risk of these hazards negatively impacting your business, and more importantly, your customers.

When considering your food manufacturing process, a ‘Critical Control Point’ (CCP) is a particular instance within that process that aims to mitigate the risk of a potential hazard occurring.

For example, this could be things like labelling, cleaning and sanitising, or regular equipment checks.

Closely associated with CCPs are their respective Critical Limits. These are tolerances that outline what is and isn’t acceptable. This could be a temperature range or a frequency of checks on equipment that provide a measurable and actionable assessment for compliance with your CCP.

These are the methods that you use to assess your CCPs are within the tolerances set by your Critical Limits. How will you measure the CCPs and with what frequency?

This principle outlines the process to be taken should a CCP exceed its tolerance range and becomes a hazard. A common example would be discarding a portion of food after it has been exposed to a temperature outside the critical limits for a specified length of time.

Creating and implementing the procedures that outline potential hazards and then control against them is the responsibility of all businesses in the food supply chain to ensure that all food products that make it to customers are safe to consume.

The final principle is to ensure that all these processes, including the tolerances, and corrective actions, are meticulously recorded to ensure compliance with food health and safety legislation, standards, and best practices.