Getting Audit Ready

An HACCP Food Safety Checklist

Food Safety audits are very much a way of life. And failure could lead to irreparable damage to your reputation.

But, as we say in our eBook, audits actually make your business better and safer. So when preparing for an audit, use this seven-point checklist (it’s based on the seven golden principles of HACCP) to guide your inspection.

Look for new food safety risks & hazards

• Do you have measures in place to report new food safety risks hazards?

• Are workers behaving the way your food safety risks hazard analysis presumes they will?

• Are all your materials appropriately labeled?

• Are all your equipment appropriately maintained?

Look for new critical control points (CCPs)

• Since your last analysis, have you accounted for new critical control points?

• When was the last time you monitored a CCP?

• Have you interviewed employees at relevant points of the production cycle to confirm that all CCPs are under control?

• Have you asked workers if there are CCPs that haven’t been documented, but should be?

• Do your visual controls clearly communicate where CCPs are?

Review your CCP limits

• If there are new CCPs, have you established the appropriate limits for them?

• Are employees enforcing your existing CCP limits? Have you interviewed them and observed them setting the limit?

• Are limits clearly communicated at each CCP?

• How many of your limits are based on regulations?

• For the limits that aren’t regulations, how frequently have you validated them?

• Do employees understand how important these limits are? If not, does your training clearly outline each limit’s importance both legally and ethically?

Continuously monitoring CCPs

• Are your CCP monitoring procedures clearly documented?

• Is there a practicable feedback mechanism in place in case workers need to report something about CCPs?

• Have you documented your assessment procedures during monitoring?

• Have you documented your plan for observing and measuring the parameters of your CCPs?

Monitoring corrective actions

• How often are corrective actions taken?

• How often are corrective actions not taken?

• When corrective actions are enforced, are you documenting how the process broke down? Are you documenting why?

• If corrective actions are being taken too often at a certain CCP, have you analysed the reasons for repeated deviations?

Verifying your HACCP plan

• Have you validated your own HACCP plans? That is, is the plan ensuring that production is safe? If not, have you documented the instances when it isn’t?

• Are workers taking short cuts that might be compromising your HACCP plan?

• What verification tasks have you assigned to plant personnel to make sure the plan is working?

• How often do they carry out these verification tasks?

• Have you documented the scientific evidence to support your critical limits?

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Seven-point checklist

Testing your documentation procedures

• How often do you update your hazard analysis documentation?

• How often do you update your HACCP plan as a whole?

• Have you documented every CCP, limitation, verification tasks and corrective action?

• Is there feedback or information that is important to your HACCP plan that you haven’t documented?

7 Kimberly-Clark Professional provides essential solutions for a safer, healthier and more productive workplace.

Invite us to walk your facility with you to spot new opportunities for greater compliance and efficiency. By visiting your facility, we can gain a deeper understanding of your operations. Once we identify areas of waste and avoidable risk, we propose countermeasures to reduce or eliminate them.

A fresh pair of eyesWhen you walk the same plant every day, it’s easy to miss things. We have conducted dozens of facility walks in the food industry, helping organisations become more productive and more compliant.

Invite us today