Business Assurance Thought of the Day, March 24, 2009: Food Safety
24th March 2009 by Alex Briggs
Today’s Business Assurance topic is food safety. This link highlights the origins of HACCP , the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points Technique that is used around the world to help organisations to identify effective control measures for food safety.
We asked our Food section editor, Cor Groenveld, if he could tell us why NASA would place such a high level of importance on food safety. He said, “For NASA it is not enough to have reliable machinery. They needed everything involved to be 100% safe, no room for error. This included the food for the astronauts. Therefore, they used the same technique for analysing hazards and risks that were implemented regarding their technical equipment to analyse the safety of the astronauts food.”
Cor went on to say, “This has resulted in HACCP being used as a guide in developing and writing the HACCP principles of Codex, which are currently being used by governments and organisations all over the world. These principles have now been incorporated into global food standards, such as ISO 22000, an important tool for organisations to realise business assurance across their supply chain.”