What's the point of HACCP?

As many food professionals know, each presentation on HACCP must start with a picture of an astronaut and a Pilsbury dough boy.  It's the law.  Ok, not really but you get the idea; food poisoning in space is not a nice thought.

That said, there are still some food companies out there for which HACCP is seen as a necessary evil not a fantastic tool to save money and time.

Really?  A food safety tool saving you money?  Well why not?


HACCP is all about prevention.  It used to be that food was made and then tested.  To some degree, there was little thought about whether or not the food was safe until the testing had been done.  This meant apart from in small retailers, food was often not released for sale until the test results came back.

It's often interesting to ask trainees when training HACCP principles how long it takes to get a full suite of microbiological tests back from a laboratory (the number of days is often underestimated but 5-7 is the normal answer I would give), then to ask how many days life a typical prepacked sandwich has (the number of days is often overestimated but 2-3 is typical).  The point is, we could not have some of the industries we have if we didn't have HACCP.

In a non food way, I like to explain HACCP as like driving a car.  If we put our health and safety head on for a minute rather than food safety, hopefully you take certain steps to protect yourself while driving.  You probably put your seatbelt on.  You don't wait for an accident and then think "oh next time I'll wear a seatbelt and then maybe I won't break my neck".  You hopefully service your car so that you know the brakes are working.  Much better than waiting to need them in an accident to find they've failed.

HACCP is the same it's all about prevention and doing it right first time.  The interesting thing with my car analogy above is that some food manufacturers "get away" with doing things wrong, just as you might "get away" without wearing your seat belt for a while.  It doesn't mean you will get away with it forever.  Whenever I read a food safety story in the press, it's often clear that things have been wrong for a while.  It's also common for the food safety issue causing the recall / crisis to be caused by failure to implement and control a prerequisite.  These are the basic things which should be in place before you even think about implementing critical control points.

If you are a small business owner and not sure how to approach HACCP or are leaving it all to your technical team members, stop.  This is your responsibility, not theirs.  Use their expertise but make sure you understand it too, make sure it's well embedded.  HACCP is a great tool and it's cut costs and created businesses which could not have existed in the past but it's only as good as it's implementation.