HACCP: the seven principles in plain English
What the seven HACCP principles mean for a working kitchen, and how critical control points turn into the checks staff perform each shift.
This is a plain-English explainer, not legal advice. The authority on this topic is the Food Standards Agency. Rules change — check the current official guidance before relying on it.
HACCP, Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point, is the framework food businesses are required to base their food safety management system on. Packs like SFBB are HACCP applied to small catering so the operator doesn't have to build one from first principles.
The framework is often presented as bureaucracy. It's closer to a method for working out which few things genuinely matter, so effort goes there instead of everywhere.
The seven principles
- Conduct a hazard analysis. What could make the food unsafe: biological, chemical, physical.
- Identify critical control points. The steps where control is essential. Cooking, chilling and hot holding usually qualify; sweeping the floor doesn't.
- Establish critical limits. The measurable boundary at each CCP. A core temperature, a time, a pH.
- Establish monitoring. How you check the limit is being met, how often, and by whom.
- Establish corrective action. What happens when a limit is breached, decided in advance.
- Establish verification. Checking the system itself works, not just that the forms are filled in.
- Establish documentation. Records proving all of the above.
Where CCPs become daily work
Principles 3, 4 and 5 are the ones staff experience. A critical limit is a number someone has to record; monitoring is the check on the rota; corrective action is what happens at 7am when the number is wrong.
This is why a check phrased as "fridges OK?" fails the framework. It has no critical limit, so it can't be breached, so principle 5 never fires. "Fridge temperature within range?" with the reading captured is monitoring against a limit, and a reading outside it can trigger the corrective action that was decided in advance rather than improvised.
Verification versus monitoring
The distinction is subtle and worth getting right. Monitoring is checking the food is safe. Verification is checking the system is working: reviewing records, confirming probes are calibrated, testing whether the corrective actions actually happened.
Most businesses monitor and never verify. Reviewing a month of readings for patterns is verification, and it's usually where you discover the fridge that has been drifting for six weeks.
Related
Turning CCPs into routines is covered under checklists, and the record-keeping side under compliance evidence.
Common questions
- What are the seven HACCP principles?
- Conduct a hazard analysis; identify critical control points; establish critical limits; establish monitoring; establish corrective action; establish verification; and establish documentation. The middle three are what staff experience day to day, because they turn into the numbers people record and what happens when a number is wrong.
- What is a critical control point?
- A step where control is essential to keep food safe and where a measurable limit can be applied — typically cooking, chilling, hot holding and cold storage. If a step has no measurable limit that could be breached, it is generally good hygiene practice rather than a critical control point.
- What is the difference between monitoring and verification in HACCP?
- Monitoring checks that the food is safe right now, such as taking a temperature against a limit. Verification checks that the system itself works — reviewing records for patterns, confirming probes are calibrated, and testing whether corrective actions actually happened. Most businesses monitor consistently and verify rarely.
More on food safety
Run these checks on a schedule
EasyBee turns recurring obligations into dated, attributable records.