Food Law, HACCP Principles and Record Keeping
Food law in the UK and EU is built on the principle that the food business operator is responsible for food safety. Candidates should know the general obligations: food must be safe, traceable, and accompanied by accurate information; premises must be registered; staff must be supervised and trained; and a food safety management system based on HACCP must be in place. In the UK, Safer Food, Better Business (SFBB) is the practical HACCP-based pack for small caterers.
HACCP has seven principles: identify hazards; determine critical control points (CCPs); set critical limits; monitor CCPs; establish corrective actions; verify; and keep records. A CCP is a step where control is essential to prevent, eliminate or reduce a hazard to an acceptable level - cooking and chilling are classic CCPs. A critical limit is the measurable boundary (e.g. 75°C core). Monitoring is the scheduled check; corrective action is what you do when the limit is breached.
Record keeping proves the system works: temperature logs, cleaning records, training records, supplier checks, and corrective action logs. Records must be accurate, dated, signed and retained.
Traps: candidates confuse a CCP with a control point (not every control is critical); forget that verification and record keeping are separate principles; and assume HACCP is only for large manufacturers (it applies to all food businesses, scaled to size).
Worked example: cooking chicken - hazard = Salmonella; CCP = cooking step; critical limit = 75°C core; monitoring = probe and log; corrective action = continue cooking and re-probe; verification = weekly review of logs.