Designing safety into products and processes

Abstract

Effective HACCP Systems will manage and control food safety issues on an ongoing basis but what they cannot do is make a fundamentally unsafe product safe. It is essential that food safety is designed into a product at the development stage and this should be the responsibility of Product Development and the HACCP Team working together. Possibly your HACCP Team will include a member of the product development department who can introduce new product/process ideas at an early stage. There is no point in new product ideas being shown to marketing departments or to customers if there are inherent safety risks which cannot be controlled. These will just be highlighted when the HACCP Study is carried out and the product launch will have to be stopped, which is not helpful in gaining customer confidence.