The Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture increasingly are adopting a food safety program first developed in the 1960s for supplying food to the astronauts. The program, known as Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point or HACCP, focuses on identifying and preventing hazards that could cause food-borne illnesses rather than relying on spot-checks of manufacturing processes and random sampling of finished food products to ensure safety. Traditionally, regulators have depended on spot-checks of manufacturing conditions and random sampling of final products to ensure safe food.

HACCP offers a number of advantages over the older system. Most importantly, HACCP:

• focuses on identifying and preventing hazards from contaminated food;
• is based on sound science;
• permits more efficient and effective government oversight, primarily because the recordkeeping allows investigators to see how well a firm is complying with food safety laws over a period of time, rather than how well it is doing on any given day;
• places responsibility for ensuring food safety appropriately on the food manufacturer or distributor; and
• helps food companies compete more effectively in the world market.

What is HACCP?

HACCP involves seven steps:

1. Analyze 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 pesticide; or physical, such as ground glass or metal fragments.
2. 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.
3. 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 microbes.
4. Establish procedures to monitor the critical control points. Such procedures might include determining how and by whom cooking time and temperature should be monitored.
5. Establish corrective actions to 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.
6. 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.
7. Establish effective recordkeeping to document the HACCP system. This would include records of hazards and their control methods, the monitoring of safety requirements and action taken to correct potential problems.

Each of these steps would have to be backed by sound scientific knowledge for example, published microbiological studies.

Who Requires HACCP?

FDA currently has HACCP food safety requirements for the low-acid canned food industry. In December 1995, FDA issued a final rule establishing HACCP requirements for the seafood industry. Those regulations took effect on Dec. 18, 1997. The U.S. Department of Commerce's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) conducts a voluntary HACCP-based seafood inspection program on a fee-for-service basis. The NOAA Program also provides services that go beyond mandatory HACCP requirements.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has established HACCP requirements for the meat and poultry industry. Larger establishments were required to start using HACCP by Jan. 26, 1998. Smaller companies had until Jan. 25, 1999, and very small plants have until Jan. 25, 2000.

The system is also in use in other countries, including Canada. HACCP has been endorsed by the National Academy of Sciences, the Codex Alimentarius Commission (an international food standard-setting organization), and the National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods.

Where Can I Get More Information about HACCP?

Additional information on HACCP is available from several federal agencies on the following websites:

• Food and Drug Administration's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition(FDA/CFSAN) website: http://vm.cfsan.fda.gov/~lrd/haccp.html
• The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) website: http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodborne/fbindex/009.htm
• The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Marine Fisheries Service (NOAA/NMFS) website: http://seafood.nmfs.noaa.gov

Contact:  maureen.breitenberg@nist.gov

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Date created: April 06, 1999
Last updated: December 14, 2005

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