HACCP plan: building one that survives an inspection

A HACCP plan is the written food safety plan a food business produces by working through the seven principles of hazard analysis and critical control points: identify the hazards, decide which steps in the process are critical to controlling them, set limits at those steps, monitor them, say what happens when a limit is breached, verify the whole thing works and keep the records that prove it. It is required, in some form, of most businesses that handle food, and it is the document an inspector asks for first.

The plan itself is usually the easy half. What businesses fail on is the last principle — the records. A beautifully reasoned analysis with a gap in the temperature log for six weeks is a worse position than a plain plan with complete records, because the plan describes intent and the records are the only evidence of practice.

What a HACCP plan contains

• A description of the product and its intended use, including who eats it — vulnerable groups change the analysis.
• A process flow diagram covering every step from delivery to service or dispatch, verified on the floor rather than drawn from memory.
• The hazard analysis: biological, chemical, physical and allergenic hazards at each step, with the reasoning for whether each is significant.
• The critical control points — the steps where control is essential and where losing it is not recoverable later.
• Critical limits at each point, as measurable numbers with units, not as adjectives.
• Monitoring: what is measured, how, how often and by whom.
• Corrective action: exactly what is done to the product and the process when a limit is breached, and who decides.
• Verification: the checks that the system is working, including calibration, review and any testing.
• The record forms themselves, and how long records are kept.

Critical limits have to be numbers

The single most common weakness is a limit written as "cook thoroughly" or "chill quickly". A critical limit is a value a person can read off an instrument and act on: a core temperature, a time, a pH, a concentration. If it cannot be measured at the moment the step happens, it is not a critical limit, and the control point is not being controlled — it is being hoped about. The numbers themselves come from your legislation, your process authority or published guidance for your product, not from a template.

Write the plan for the person doing the monitoring. The chef checking a probe at the end of a shift is the reader, not the auditor. If a step cannot be understood by that reader in one go, it will be recorded as compliant regardless of what actually happened.

A HACCP plan for a restaurant is not a factory plan

Kitchens have a small number of genuinely critical points — cooking, cooling, hot holding, reheating, and the storage temperatures around them — and a long list of prerequisites that are not critical control points at all: cleaning, pest control, supplier approval, personal hygiene, allergen separation. Small operations lose weeks by treating every prerequisite as a control point, generating monitoring nobody can sustain, and then abandoning the whole thing. The right shape for a kitchen is a short plan with a handful of measured points and a set of prerequisite programmes running underneath it. Menu changes are the trigger to revisit it, and so is a new supplier or a new piece of equipment.

The records are the deliverable

Daily checks, corrective actions, calibration, training, supplier documentation and reviews all have to be retrievable on the day somebody asks. Ettex Docs holds the plan itself with version history, so what was in force at the time of an incident is not a matter of opinion; Ettex Forms collects the daily checks where they happen, with the value typed once rather than copied from a clipboard later; and Ettex Records keeps the log, the corrective actions and the supplier paperwork as one file per site.

Being direct about what this is not: we are not food safety software. There is no probe integration, no temperature telemetry, no pre-written hazard library and no certification. Your critical limits and whether your plan meets the law where you operate are matters for your food safety authority, your guidance documents and, above a certain scale, a consultant — not for a document tool.