Monday 5 June 2017

GLOBAL FOOD SAFETY INITIATIVE


GLOBAL FOOD SAFETY INITIATIVE

The Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) is a private organization, established and managed by the international trade association, the Consumer Goods Forum under Belgian law in May 2000. The GFSI maintains a scheme to benchmark food safety standards for manufacturers as well as farm assurance standards.
The GFSI objectives are to:
  • Reduce food safety risks by delivering equivalence and convergence between effective food safety management systems
  • Manage cost in the global food system by eliminating redundancy and improving operational efficiency
  • Develop competencies and capacity building in food safety to create consistent and effective global food systems
  • Provide a unique international stakeholder platform for collaboration, knowledge exchange and networking. (Wikipedia, 2017)
The Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) has defined the Food Safety Management Umbrella to include HACCP (hazard/ Food Safety), TACCP (threat/ Food Defense) and VACCP (vulnerability/ Food Fraud). These are defined as three separate pillars that will need to be addressed individually.
Hazard analysis and critical control points or HACCP (/ˈhæsʌp/) is a systematic preventive approach to food safety from biological, chemical, and physical hazards in production processes that can cause the finished product to be unsafe, and designs measurements to reduce these risks to a safe level. In this manner, HACCP attempts to avoid hazards rather than attempting to inspect finished products for the effects of those hazards. The HACCP system can be used at all stages of a food chain, from food production and preparation processes including packaging, distribution, etc. (Wikipedia, 2017).

HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point)



What is HACCP?
  • HACCP = food safety
  • Prevention of unintentional accidental adulteration, Science based, Food borne illness.
  • Is a production control system for the food industry. It is a process that identifies where potential contamination can occur (the critical control points or CCPs) and strictly manages and monitors these points as a way of ensuring the process is in control and that the safest product possible is being produced. HACCP is designed to prevent rather than catch potential hazards.
Who & When?
  • Is not owned or regulated by any organisation. The principles of HACCP are codified (written down) by the World Health Organisation (WHO), which is part of the United Nations (UN), in a set of documents called the Codex Alimentarius, The principles of HACCP are described in the Annex of the Codex GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF FOOD HYGIENE CAC/RCP 1-1969.
HACCP expanded in all realms of the food industry, going into meat, poultry, seafood, dairy, and has spread now from the farm to the fork.
Principles
1.    Conduct a hazard analysis
Plans determine the food safety hazards and identify the preventive measures the plan can apply to control these hazards. A food safety hazard is any biological, chemical, or physical property that may cause a food to be unsafe for human consumption.
2.    Identify critical control points
A critical control point (CCP) is a point, step, or procedure in a food manufacturing process at which control can be applied and, as a result, a food safety hazard can be prevented, eliminated, or reduced to an acceptable level.
3.    Establish critical limits for each critical control point
A critical limit is the maximum or minimum value to which a physical, biological, or chemical hazard must be controlled at a critical control point to prevent, eliminate, or reduce that hazard to an acceptable level.
4.    Establish critical control point monitoring requirements
Monitoring activities are necessary to ensure that the process is under control at each critical control point. In the United States, the FSIS requires that each monitoring procedure and its frequency be listed in the HACCP plan.
5.    Establish corrective actions
These are actions to be taken when monitoring indicates a deviation from an established critical limit. The final rule requires a plant's HACCP plan to identify the corrective actions to be taken if a critical limit is not met. Corrective actions are intended to ensure that no product is injurious to health or otherwise adulterated as a result if the deviation enters commerce.
6.    Establish procedures for ensuring the HACCP system is working as intended
Validation ensures that the plants do what they were designed to do; that is, they are successful in ensuring the production of a safe product. Plants will be required to validate their own HACCP plans. FSIS will not approve HACCP plans in advance, but will review them for conformance with the final rule.
Verification ensures the HACCP plan is adequate, that is, working as intended. Verification procedures may include such activities as review of HACCP plans, CCP records, critical limits and microbial sampling and analysis. FSIS is requiring that the HACCP plan include verification tasks to be performed by plant personnel. Verification tasks would also be performed by FSIS inspectors. Both FSIS and industry will undertake microbial testing as one of several verification activities. Verification also includes 'validation' – the process of finding evidence for the accuracy of the HACCP system (e.g. scientific evidence for critical limitations).
7.    Establish record keeping procedures
The HACCP regulation requires that all plants maintain certain documents, including its hazard analysis and written HACCP plan, and records documenting the monitoring of critical control points, critical limits, verification activities, and the handling of processing deviations. Implementation involves monitoring, verifying, and validating of the daily work that is compliant with regulatory requirements in all stages all the time. The differences among those three types of work are given by Saskatchewan Agriculture and Food.
How to implement?


TACCP (Threat Assessment Critical Control Point)


What is TACCP?
Threat assessment and critical control point applies well-understood HACCP principles to protect food and beverage products from intentional and malicious contamination.
Ensuring consumer safety is one of our prime and major objective in food businesses. Be it farming, processing, manufacturing, distribution, food transportation, catering and hospitality, the essence of (food) safety can’t be ignored.
  • TACCP = prevention of malicious threats to food, such as sabotage, extortion or terrorism.
  • Prevention of intentional adulteration, Behaviorally or ideologically Motivated.
  • Stated as “The main generic threats are malicious contamination with toxic materials, sabotage of the supply chain and misuse of food and drink materials for terrorist or criminal purposes. A successful attack could disrupt business and undermine brands, and could lead to illness and death.”
Who & When?
  • The TACCP concept was introduced and implemented in the British Standards institute’s Public Available Standard 96 Food Defence (PAS 96). 
How to implement?
Watch  a clip from  YouTube on TACCP?
Click here:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O6BaEfzIuA


VACCP (Vulnerability Assessment Critical Control Point)

What is VACCP?
The issue of food fraud in the supply chain is becoming increasingly important in the food industry. Hence the need for a systematic approach to identify the threat of economically motivated adulteration and assess the vulnerable points within the supply chain to satisfy the requirements of Clause 5.4 in the BRC Global Standard for Food Safety Issue 7
Vulnerability Assessment and Critical Control Point applies well-understood HACCP principles to protect food and beverage products from fraud and adulteration.
  • VACCP = prevention of economically motivated food fraud.
  • According to John Spink, assistant professor and director of the Food Fraud Initiative (FFI), Michigan State University. A vulnerability is a state of being that could lead to an incident. For example, GFSI defines food fraud, including the subcategory of economically motivated adulteration (EMA), as “the deception of consumers using food products, ingredients and packaging for economic gain and includes substitution, unapproved enhancements, misbranding, counterfeiting, stolen goods or others.
Who & When?
In July 2012 the GFSI Board of Directors requested that a Food Fraud Think Tank (FFTT) be created to review the topic and explore if or how Food Fraud could be incorporated in the GFSI Guidance Document. The group was originally called “economic adulteration” but broadened the scope to all types of Fraud. 
How to implement?


Difference between HACCP, TACCP and VACCP

They all sound very similar and all are involved in the safety of the food we manufacture, but what exactly is the difference between HACCP, TACCP and VACCP?
HACCP – Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point
HACCP, as many of you will know, was initially developed in the 1960s by NASA to prevent astronauts from contracting food poisoning in space. It has since been refined and is now part of every major food manufacturer/supplier’s day-to-day routine. It stands for Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points and can be approached either by product or process.
The HACCP team evaluates the entire production process step by step from delivery intake to packaging and transport of the completed product. During this process any stages where the product could be subject to physical, microbiological or chemical contamination are identified. Measures are put in place for those deemed critical (i.e. metal detectors, temperature controls, cleaning etc.) and these are regularly monitored to ensure that the end product is safe for human consumption.
TACCP – Threat Assessment Critical Control Point
Relatively new, TACCP, by comparison stands for Threat Assessment Critical Control Point. An essential part of food safety management and required under the latest BRC version 7 Global Standard, it was developed in reaction to the increase in food fraud detected in recent years. The most widely reported was, of course, the horsemeat scandal but food fraud manifests itself in a variety of different ways.
Whereas HACCP is concerned with the prevention of food-borne illnesses and the prevention of unintentional or accidental hazards/threats to food safety, TACCP is concerned with the prevention of deliberate and intentional food fraud. This can take the form of substitution of ingredients, passing off of one foodstuff for another, false or misleading statements  for economic gain that could impact public health, product tampering, fake or incorrect labelling etc. Product traceability throughout the supply chain is hence of vital importance.
VACCP – Vulnerability Assessment and Critical Control Points
TACCP and VACCP go hand in hand in the quest to demonstrate product authenticity. Both are designed to prevent the intentional adulteration of food. TACCP identifies the threat of behaviourally or economically-motivated adulteration; VACCP identifies how vulnerable various points in the supply chain are to the threat of economically-motivated adulteration.
References:
1.     Verner Wheelock Associates Training Blog  http://vwa.co.uk/blog/news/haccp-taccp-vaccp-whats-the-difference/
2.     Food Engineering http://www.foodengineeringmag.com/articles/95205-vaccp-haccp-for-vulnerability-assessments
3.     Robby Manullang (2016) HACCP, TACCP and VACCP - The Three Pillars;  https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/haccp-taccp-vaccp-three-pillars-robby-manullang-?
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