What HACCP actually means on a line
Most people meet HACCP as paperwork. A folder someone fills in on Friday for an audit that happens in March.
That is not what it is. HACCP is the short list of moments where you can still kill the hazard, and after which you cannot. Everything else is just cooking.
Take the shrimp for our tempura.
They arrive. They go in the chiller. They get peeled, battered, fried to order, and anything prepped and not used goes back cold. A hazard is present at every one of those steps. But you only control it at a few, and those few are your critical control points.
The chiller runs 0 to 4. That is a critical limit — the number that tells you whether the control actually worked. Not "cold". Not "it feels fine". Zero to four, checked, written down.
Cooked to a core of 75. Held above 63. Those are the other two numbers I work to, and between them they cover most of what leaves my section.
A limit is worth nothing if nobody reads it, so the next principle is monitoring: who checks, and how often.
Then corrective action, and this is the part people get backwards. It is not "write it in the book". It is the decision about the food in front of you. If the probe says 68 and the limit is 75, the corrective action is what happens to that food. The paperwork is not the action.
Verification is the one everybody forgets. Someone has to check that the checks are real. A probe that has never been calibrated is a number, not a control.
The record comes last. It exists so somebody can prove the decision was made. Treating it as the first principle instead of the last is the whole reason cooks think HACCP is filing.
