HACCP plan template

This sizes a HACCP plan before anyone writes it. Enter the process steps from delivery to service, the hazards identified across them, the critical control points, the monitoring checks per CCP per day, the days you open, the minutes a check takes including the record, the staff who must be trained and your review cycle, and the page returns the checks per day, the records per week, the monitoring minutes per day and hours per week, the sections the written plan needs, the hazard density per step and the reviews per year. A HACCP plan is a document with a monitoring load behind it; these are the figures, from your own counts.

Seven sections for the seven principles, plus one per CCP

The FDA's HACCP guidance is built on seven principles: conduct a hazard analysis, determine the critical control points, establish critical limits, establish monitoring procedures, establish corrective actions, establish verification procedures, and establish record-keeping and documentation procedures. A working plan carries a section for each, and then one per critical control point with its limit, its monitoring, its corrective action and its record on one page. The tool counts the sections that way so the plan is written in the shape the inspector reads.

The monitoring load is the number that decides whether the plan is followed

Four CCPs checked three times a day, six days a week, is seventy-two records a week and, at two minutes each, an hour and a bit of somebody's week. That is sustainable. Twelve CCPs checked hourly is not, and a plan the kitchen cannot sustain is one it quietly stops following. The page prints the checks, the records and the hours so the plan is sized to the kitchen before the first record is missed.

Hazards per step says where the plan is thin

Twelve hazards across nine steps is a plausible density; two hazards across nine steps means the analysis stopped early, and thirty means every hazard was listed without asking which ones a CCP actually controls. The page prints the density times ten so a half-hazard does not round away, and so the number is compared between plans rather than judged in isolation.