If you want to start any business in the food industry, for instance, a restaurant, processing plant or farm, you must have a proper safety plan in place that lists all the steps your food product goes through, starting from the back door operations to the time it leaves your store for consumption. Even though you might be already using safe food handling or agricultural practices, developing your personalised food safety plan helps makes those safety practices more visible. The plan also helps keep you accountable to local food safety programs, policies, and practices you are supposed to be following. Here are a few tips on how to write a food safety plan.
Get a Qualified Person
The first step in how to write a food safety plan is to get a HACCP qualified individual to help in the development of the plan. This person must have both the education as well as necessary experience related to food safety.
Identify the Specific Foods
The next step as you learn how to write a food safety plan are to clearly identifier all aspects of the food you will be dealing with. This includes product description, anticipated clients, and reasonable uses, processing methods, ingredients, packaging and shelf-life among others.
Identify Potential Hazards
You need to address three different hazards: chemical, physical and biological. This means listing all the foreseeable hazards in the plan.
Evaluate Hazards
After the hazards have been clearly identified in how to write a food safety plan, you must figure out whether any hazards are significant and therefore offer the needed preventive control.
Determine Preventive Controls
A preventive control is basically a suitable procedure that will considerably reduce or prevent the earlier identified significant hazard, such as sanitation and employee hygiene.
Validation
The next segment as you learns how to write a food safety plan is validation. This is the technical and scientific bases that show that a control significantly reduces the risk of the hazards being managed. This includes maintaining pH, temperature and time among others.
Monitoring
Monitoring is a planned and documented event at a certain interval that ensures that control parameters are maintained. It acts as an early warning system, shows effective control implementation and also generates data for verification.
Corrective Actions and Verification
Corrective actions need to be documented for the preventive control measures, for example, immediately stopping production on the affected product. Finally, verification must be done periodically and corrective actions taken, along with the proper documentation of all these tasks.
As you learn how to write a food safety plan, remember that it will be unique to your business needs, so you should strive and understand the different components of the plan as shown above.