White paper explores HACCP and the food industry
New white paper from Flowcrete explores HACCP compliant flooring materials and provides recommendations on flooring systems suitable for today’s food industry.
Flowcrete UK has produced a white paper entitled What is a HACCP Food Safety Management System and How Does it Relate to Flooring? to help food and beverage businesses learn about this preventive risk assessment tool and ensure that all facilities comply with its guidelines.
Flowcrete UK’s managing director, Kevin Potter, said: “We’ve worked with some of the world’s largest food producers at their most challenging plants and we’ve always ensured that the knowledge, experience and skills we’ve built up have been put to use creating floors that effectively meet the industry’s multifaceted demands.
“This white paper has been produced as part of our commitment to advise the food industry on best practice flooring, as it is essential to follow HACCP’s rules in order to ensure that the finish underfoot will provide the necessary properties for a food facility.”
As the white paper explains, being HACCP compliant is vital to fulfilling the increasingly strict requirements of industry regulators. This is exemplified by the Food Safety & Hygiene (England) Regulations 2013 which reiterates Article 5 (1) of Regulation 852/2004 of the European Parliament: "Food business operators put in place, implement and maintain a permanent procedure or procedures based on the HACCP principles." Parallel legislation is also in force in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
When combined with the fact that many nations will require food to have been produced according to the same or similar principles, this means that failing to meet the HACCP benchmark can stop businesses from trading both domestically and internationally.
The HACCP process involves analysing food safety hazards and putting in place appropriate controls to eliminate or reduce contamination. Getting the floor area right is central to this, as failing to do so could put the facility at risk from unwanted and difficult to eradicate bacteria build-up which could easily infiltrate and spoil produce onsite.
In the white paper readers will be able to find out what flooring characteristics and certifications they need to look out for in order to ensure that floors within production, processing and storage areas live up to the HACCP standard.
The white paper also examines how HACCP came to be created, the role it plays in the UK’s regulations as well as the product certification scheme HACCP International, which evaluates materials, equipment and services used within the food industry.
Getting ahead with HACCP is not an option, as the future of the food industry is towards ever more regulated use of due diligence programs. For example, the FSA's Foodborne Disease Strategy, a compliance and enforcement plan, aims to secure major improvements in public protection and health through an overall better and more efficient risk-based regulatory system.
