Good Manufacturing Practices and following HACCP guidelines

[Marion Hinj]

Hello,

 

Last week for blending spices I reached one spice milling service in Canada. There I found some food packages and in that it is mentioned like " products are manufactured by following HACCP guidelines". I started googling it and found many options on this, is anyone knows what exactly it is? If you know, please share it and that will be a great help.

[paulraphael]

It stands for Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point. Which is wonderfully awful and ambiguous. But it refers to a regimented set of rules for preparing food safely, including documenting the exact source of every ingredient and documenting times and temperatures of every step critical to safety. It's a colossal pain in the ass, and used primarily with foods that pose special hazards or when serving people who have compromised immune systems.

 

It was originally developed for companies that manufactured food for astronauts. As you can imagine, a case of salmonella on the space station or a moon landing vehicle would suck more than the usual amount.

[pbear]

That's it, in a nutshell.  The basic idea is that consumers may have confidence in the safety of food products so manufactured.

 

To go deeper will require a lot of reading.  Wiki gives a good summary of HACCP generally..  For a more detailed and technical discussion, see this FDA webpage.  As applied to the spice products mentioned in the OP, the Canadian regulators have two webpages: HACCP Generic Model for Spices and Food Safety Practices Guidance for Spice Manufacturers.  Notice these pages don't tell us exactly what the manufacturers are doing.  Rather, they describe principles and procedures to be used in developing HACCP plans.  For implementation, we're dependent on the manufacturers themselves (who hire food scientists for the purpose) and oversight by the regulators.

[paulraphael]

A big kerfuffle in NYC is a recent law requiring HACCP plans for any restaurant with a vacuum packing machine. All because of a health dept. that didn't understand sous-vide cooking, and so decided a wild and irrational overreaction was in order. This has placed a huge burden on restaurants that just wanted to cook food the way every other good restaurant in the U.S. and abroad is doing it. I'm not sure how they all manage ... if they're really creating these plans and filing them with the dept., and having consultants and inspectors checking them out all the time, or if they're just hiding the machines in the basement.

[Edward J]

Meh....

 

In 1997 I opened up a catering business and part of the local health requirments was to write a selection of dishes to be cooked following the haccp plans.  This was submited with a lot of other criteria and inspected before a business license could be issued, or even my premises inspected.

 

It's not all that difficult and actually makes a lot of sense.

 

Lets say I want to make chocolate chip cookies.

 

ingredients:

flour

butter

sugar

eggs

vanilla

chocolate

salt

baking powder

 

 

1) Where do the ingredients come from?

2) How were they transported?

3)How long are the expiry dates?

4)What procedures are in place to accept or decline the ingredients?

5) How will the ingredients be stored?

6)What method is used to store and track down batch numbers of the various ingredients should a incident occur?

 

7) How are the ingredients scaled out?

8)What sanitation methods are used to to clean the various utensils?

9)What methods are in place to ensure proper sanitation?

 

10)How will the ingredients be mixed?

11)What sanitation methods are used to clean the mixing equipment?

12What methods are in place to ensure proper sanitation?

 

Repeat the same questions for scooping out or deposting the cookies

 

How will the cookies be baked?

What methods are in place to ensure cookies are baked at proper temp and time?

 

How will the cookies be cooled down?

What methods are in place to ensure cookies are cooled within time guidlines?

 

How are cookies packaged?

What methods are in place to ensure cookies are packaged to guidlines?

 

and then,

-labeling

-best before date

 

-Storage

-Transport

 

-What procedures are in place if cookies are still being sold on or after the Expiry date?

 

and,

Most importantly,

 

Recall procedures should an incident occur

(example the egg company declares that batch 209/exp. 15/07/14 may contain salamonella) 

-Did you purchase this batch of eggs?

-Can you pull them or get them pulled of the shelves of your customers?

-What procedures are in place to destroy the cookies?

 

 

Basically it's a system that makes you think and anticipate any problems that may lay ahead.

 

Vancouver Coastal Health wants every food service establishment to do this with at least 5 dishes

[paulraphael]

Yeah, I think I'd rather do my taxes.

 

From what I've heard, the biggest nuisance in NYC is actually filing the plan and dealing with getting it reviewed and approved.