Food Hygiene

HACCP and Food Hygiene

Effective hygiene controls are vital  preventing food borne illness, food borne injury and food spoilage. Ensuring the safety and the quality of the product, specific actions are required. The control operations are the foundation of the Hygiene system to follow into the food manifactury.

 Control of Operation

• 1. Product Formulation and Composition
• 2. Labelling and Net Quantity
• 3. Process Design
• 4. Incoming Material Control
• 5. Packaging Material Control
• 6. Product Preparation and Blending
• 7. Product Coding Control
• 8. Process Control
• 9. Labelling Control
• 10. Deviations and Corrective Action
• 11Verification of Product Safety

Food law is concerned with the sanitary aspects related to food in all its production steps : primary production , storage materials process, production of semi-finished products , secondary production or final process , packaging , storage , distribution, storage, sale, administration .

The discipline of Food Hygiene is based on three key points :

-         The legislation

-         Guides to good hygiene practice

-         HACCP ( self-control system )

The law and its rules and regulations says that specific features such as safety, quality, healthy must be ensured by the manifactured process if the food have to sell, without them the same food would be unsuitable or better say not in accordance with the current legislation and therefore not salable .

The meaning of hygienistic -Sanitary of not suitable to sale, it means that food can be a real danger to the health of the consumer because its consuption is not allowed by the law.

Genarally, the acronyc GHP indicates the Hygiene Principles, these are valued by the Ministry of Labour, Health and Social Policy and by the National Institute of Health and must follow the law of European Parliament and of the country itself and of the council which is related to.

 The duties of manuals are to give a reference to everyone that work in the tranformation or sale of food to the costumers, in this case the knowledges about Hygiene principles and whole the control operations to consider are required because each seller and productore have to add their principles to own job activity.

HACCP is a systematic procedure serving to identify microbiological, chemical and physical hazards as early as food manufacturing and to eliminate these hazards by taking the suitable measures.

 

The origins of the HACCP concept date back to 1959. In this year, NASA implemented a project in co-operation with the Pillsbury Company in the US. At that time the goal was to manufacture food that could even be used in outer space because risk due to biological, chemical or physical hazards could be excluded with a certainty of 100 per cent (“zero defects program”). 

After being published by FAO/WHO (Food and Agriculture Organization/World Health Organization) and after being taken over by European food industry and its legislation, HACCP forms the basis of all the food safety systems.

 The most important document is the document “Basic Text on Food Hygiene”, which has the title “Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) System and guidelines for its application, Annex to CAC/RCP 1-1969 (Rev. Hygiene 4 - 2003)”. The HACCP concept is a basic part of the earlier Food Hygiene Regulation and an elementary part of the current EC Hygiene Package, which has been applicable since 2006. Therefore, the HACCP concept must absolutely be implemented as a legal requirement. 

The benefits that may be drawn from the HACCP audit offered by Quality Austria are the optimisation of the implemented HACCP system and evidencing compliance with the obligation to exercise due diligence and efficiently monitor food risk. The main value added is the fact that the industrial and commercial customers’ confidence in product safety is increased. The HACCP concept can easily be integrated in an existing quality management system.

QA Food System is a complex job because it’s full of actions to struggle. Several workers have to cooperate each day to ensure credibility and trust to their job. If whole the scandals and problems that are born during the past and connected with the food system processes, the job of a Hygienist is hard and rich of features to consider with: law, the specific processes, each food origin, the specific step of production, Chemical and Phisical features related with the food. For this reason the food assurance topic will be never finished to be studied.