The Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) Food Safety Management System

We’re Here to Help You Create a Flawless Food Safety Program

A fail-safe food safety program is required for every entity that deals with food—from sourcing ingredients to production to consumption. The Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) management system is the standard for food safety procedures worldwide.

So, HACCP principles must be the foundation of every reputable food safety program, especially if an organization expects to comply with local to international food safety regulations.

What is HACCP?

You could say HACCP is the flagship food safety program. Its primary goal is to help you implement best practices that reduce the risk of unsafe food.

As the basis of regulations, HACCP is a food safety system that stresses analysis and control of biological, chemical, and physical hazards from raw material food production, procurement, and handling to manufacturing, distribution, and consumption.

Why Monnit and HACCP?

Monnit Remote Monitoring Solutions—with the combined power of our sensors, meters, gateways, and software—are designed specifically with HACCP requirements in mind. Monnit Solutions can help you meet and even exceed HACCP standards and other critical food safety regulations.

When you think of all the work, processes, and parties involved in producing a meal sold in a store or restaurant, it’s easy to see how many ways food-borne risk can be at play. Like our solutions, HACCP helps you combat threats at any farm-to-fork food stage.

Monnit Solutions can be there in virtually every process, making sure that you meet HACCP food safety mandates. Our Temperature Monitoring Solutions are perfect for helping you comply with HACCP requirements and eliminate risk to your food safety program’s success. Make HACCP and Monnit Solutions central to your food safety program to give your customers, the public, and regulatory bodies confidence that your program is above reproach.

What are HACCP principles, and how can Monnit help you comply with them?

1. Conduct a hazard analysis.

Assess the risk associated with the processes you manage. Take a close look at any biological, physical, or chemical risk that might pose a problem during food sourcing, production, storage, packaging, or any other process. Could bacteria, foreign bodies, or allergens be added at any step? Now’s the time to ask these critical questions so your assessment is thorough and effective. Monnit Temperature Sensors can help you ensure all of your food ingredients and products meet required temperatures at spot checks and throughout each process.

2. Identify critical control points (CCPs).

Find the exact points in your food manufacturing process where it’s prone to risk and can be controlled. That’s the key—at what points can you be in control of your operations? For example, you can identify a CCP if you’re cooking meat that needs to be at a specific temperature to be safe. The CCP is when you determine whether the food has been cooked safely and is ready to be packaged, stored, distributed, or served to a customer. That CCP is where Monnit comes in to help automatically with our Wireless Thermocouple Sensor attached to a commercial oven, for example, or our Wireless Food Probe Sensor used at a critical spot-check stage. Monnit Sensors provide reliable and repeatable automated data collection.

3. Establish critical limits.

Set critical limits (minimum to maximum) for each CCP that you must control to ensure your food’s safety. Especially high-risk foods like meat or eggs. Establishing a critical limit, for example, means deciding the exact temperature that the item must reach. Each CCP must have one or more critical limits for each hazard, such as those measuring time, temperature, acidity, or best before dates. Required limits on food temperature are essential to eliminating the risks of harmful bacteria. With our Wireless Food Probe, you can assess temperature in a range of -50.0°C to 260.0°C (-58.0°F to 500.0°F) and a calibrated accuracy of ± 0.3°C (± 0.54°F).

4. Monitor CCPs.

Ensure food remains within the critical limits that you determined at each CCP. The way you monitor a CCP can be tricky if you’re using a manual monitoring technique like observing a cleaning schedule, sensing taste and smell, or checking chemical levels. The method you use to monitor a CCP should be documented, tracked, and preferably automated. Using one of our Temperature Sensors and Pressure Meters can help you handle the physical monitoring of CCPs with automated data-logging to the cloud for easy access and retrieval.

5. Take corrective actions.

Create procedures that you must follow when a critical limit deviates into dangerous territory. These necessary corrective actions are the payoff from your CCP monitoring. They’ll prevent potentially hazardous food from becoming a problem by entering the food chain. Corrective actions should include the documented steps taken to ensure the issue will not occur again. Tracking actionable data on an iMonnit Software dashboard and instantly being alerted via an email, text, or call by one of our Temperature Sensors when it detects a passed preset parameter can help you quickly take corrective action.

6. Verify the program.

Make sure the HACCP system you’ve established is working as intended. Your food safety plan should be a “living document.” Policies and procedures are only effective if they accomplish what’s required to maintain food safety. A good plan means one you’re regularly testing. What’s happening around your CCPs is an excellent place to audit. You should periodically check to see if your program performs as expected and what could improve it. Analyzing what our sensors have been telling you with alerts and in iMonnit can help you see where and what you can improve with your CCPs.

7. Set up record-keeping.

Document everything that’s considered evidence of your food safety program in action. Overall, your record-keeping procedures should include a hazard analysis summary, corrective actions, your HACCP plan, support documentation, and records generated during operations. Traceability is vital to help resolve problems and ease the evaluation process. For example, many restaurants record all temperatures they measure, whether for cooked or refrigerated food. Automatic reporting is ideal. iMonnit Software helps ensure that you have automated data-logging documentation, HACCP processes work as they should, and you have a backup if there are queries later.