Assessing the effectiveness of critical control points to guarantee food safety

Abstract

Regulation No. 852/2004 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 29 April 2004, on the hygiene of foodstuffs, is compulsory in its entirety and directly applicable in all Member States since 1 January 2006. Articles 12 and 13 state food business operators should establish and operate food safety programmes and procedures based the hazard analysis and critical control point (HACCP) principles as the HACCP system is an instrument to help food business operators attain a higher standard of food safety. In addition, article 15 establishes the HACCP requirements should take account of the seven principles contained in the Codex Alimentarius. Production of safe food based on the implementation of the principles of the HACCP ultimately relies on the effectiveness of the control and monitoring systems implemented at each of its critical control points (CCP). Thus, it is worthy to have a method available to estimate the CCP effectiveness as it could be used to provide quantitative measure of the suitability of the HACCP plan. This paper presents a method to assess the effectiveness of the critical control point based on the consideration of the performance of the couple control-monitoring system. An application example is also provided showing how the new approach performs in assessing CCP effectiveness by appropriately assessing and differentiating the influence of the capability and reliability of the control-monitoring system.