Build a HACCP Plan from Scratch

The 5 preliminary steps and 7 principles, one lesson at a time, in the order you build them.

1. Before the 7 principles: the 5 things you do firstThe five preliminary steps that make a HACCP plan buildable — assemble the team, describe the product, name its use and its eaters, draw the process flow, and prove the flow true on the floor.
2. Principle 1: find the hazards that can actually hurt someoneHow to run a defensible hazard analysis — walk your verified flow diagram step by step, name every biological, chemical, and physical hazard, and judge which are significant enough that safety depends on controlling them.
3. Principle 2: which steps are truly critical control pointsHow to turn your significant hazards into a short, defensible list of critical control points — the steps where control is genuinely essential — and tell them apart from what a prerequisite program already handles.
4. Principles 3 and 4: critical limits and monitoring that hold upHow to set a measurable, validated critical limit for each critical control point, and build a monitoring routine that proves control while the work is happening rather than after it.
5. Principles 5 and 6: corrective actions and proving the plan worksHow to decide in advance what happens when a critical control point fails — fix the process, control the affected product, document it — and build the verification routine that proves your whole plan is being followed and actually holds.
6. Principle 7: records an auditor will acceptHow to keep the records your HACCP plan generates in a form that proves control and survives an audit — made as the work happens, signed, dated, kept for the right length of time, and stored so any one of them is minutes away.