Accreditation
HACCP stands for “Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point”. HACCP is an internationally-recognised food safety certification system.
Farmer Joe's Chicken uses its HACCP plan as a mechanism to ensure continuous improvement and is externally audited twice a year to ensure it is complying with the international standard.
Farmer Joe's Chicken has implemented the following Quality Systems to ensure you get the best available quality for your money.
- NCS International – Codex HACCP Principals
- NSW Food Authority – Licence to Operate Meat Processing Plant Class 3
What is HACCP?
The US Food and Drug Administration developed the HACCP system after the success of a food safety program developed for the US space program. The NASA program focussed on preventing hazards that could cause food-borne illnesses by applying science-based controls throughout the food manufacturing process, from raw material to finished products.
Traditionally, industry has depended on spot-checks of manufacturing conditions and random sampling of final products to ensure safe food. This approach, however, tends to be reactive, rather than preventive and is less efficient than the HACCP (pronounced "hassap") system.
HACCP has been endorsed by the US National Academy of Sciences, the Codex Alimentarius Commission (an international food standard-setting organisation), and the US National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods.
HACCP involves seven principles:
- Analyse hazards. Potential hazards associated with a food and measures to control those hazards are identified. The hazard could be biological, such as a microbe; chemical, such as a toxin; or physical, such as ground glass or metal fragments.
- Identify critical control points. These are points in a food's production - from its raw state through processing and shipping to consumption by the consumer - at which the potential hazard can be controlled or eliminated. Examples are cooking, cooling, packaging and metal detection.
- Establish preventive measures with critical limits for each control point. For a cooked food, for example, this might include setting the minimum cooking temperature and time required to ensure the elimination of any harmful microbes.
- Establish procedures to monitor the critical control points. Such procedures might include determining how and by whom cooking time and temperature should be monitored.
- Establish corrective actions. These actions will be taken when monitoring shows that a critical limit has not been met - for example, reprocessing or disposing of food if the minimum cooking temperature is not met.
- Establish procedures to verify that the system is working properly. For example, testing time-and-temperature recording devices to verify that a cooking unit is working properly.
- Establish effective recordkeeping to document the HACCP system. This includes records of hazards and their control methods, the monitoring of safety requirements and action taken to correct potential problems.
Each of these principles must be backed by sound scientific knowledge: for example, published microbiological studies on time and temperature factors for controlling food-borne pathogens.
