How to Combine Your HACCP and HARPC Plans

The main compliance date of September 2017 for the Preventive Controls Rule for Human Food is fast approaching. Facilities now have the daunting task of trying to amend their current food safety systems to meet the new requirements, which are becoming well known as HARPC (Hazard Analysis and Risk-Based Preventive Controls).

Need for a Combined System

Many facilities already have well-established Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) or National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods (NACMCF) based food safety systems. These sites will continue to be asked to comply with HACCP or NACMCF requirements by their customers, accreditation standards, and also by local legislation in the countries to which they export product.

At first glance, the requirements in HACCP or NACMCF and HARPC may look aligned, but facilities must be careful, as there are a number of fundamental differences, which need to be considered before making any alterations to their current food safety systems.

The Differences

New HARPC requirements demand a new mindset, which many HACCP specialists are finding difficult to embody.

Although the Preventive Control Rule is very clear about what the food safety plan should achieve, it does not stipulate how it should be laid out and documented. Many of the understood practices from HACCP and NACMCF are not detailed in the rule (such as a scope, product description, intended use, intended user, or a process flow diagram). It could, thereby, be presumed that these elements are no longer required.

However, it would be naïve to think that these key elements could be excluded from any effective food safety plan. Gathering information about the product and process is essential to ensuring that the pertinent hazards are defined. If used properly, these tools can be advantageous to the HARPC system. Plus, facilities need to adhere to the current requirements for food safety because they will need to continue to include this type of information in their system if they want to continue to meet customers’ expectations and accreditation.

The Main Discrepancy

There is one fundamental difference between the HACCP and HARPC requirements that requires special attention.

Both systems require hazard analysis to assess the significance of the food safety hazards. Typically, in a HACCP system, the significant hazards would then be assessed to determine which need controlling through the application of a CCP. Contrarily, the FDA indicates that to meet the Preventive Control Rule, all food safety hazards must be assessed without taking any current controls into account.

Though this change seems slight, its consequences could be huge, requiring a different approach to ensure the manageability of the system.

With HACCP, the norm is to include all possible hazards, even those unlikely to occur, to make sure all eventualities are covered. During the risk assessment process, these hazards would then be knocked off the list by accounting for the controls in place.

By applying HARPC principles and assessing this number of hazards without taking the controls into account, the result would be that a high proportion of the hazards would become significant, and therefore, would require the application of a preventive control. The food industry would find itself in a similar situation to when HACCP was first introduced and many facilities, due to the lack of pre-requisites or Good Manufacturing Practices (GMPs), had numerous CCPs. This caused the system to be unwieldy and consequentially ineffective.

Importance of Scoping

The solution is to ensure that only pertinent hazards are channeled into the hazard analysis. To do this in a structured way, so that it can be explained at an inspection with confidence, a methodology is required.

As mentioned above, product description, intended use, intended user, and process flow diagrams can be used to your advantage at this stage. By detailing such information during the scoping section of the assessment, prior to the hazard analysis, the pertinent hazards that would affect the safety of the product from the inherent characteristics, components, storage conditions, shelf life, food safety treatments, and hurdles, can be extracted.