Core Reading List: Food Safety _ A Practical Guide and Case Study Approach

Hello,
This month, I have prepared a summary of one book of my master core reading list.
*Food Safety: A Practical and Case Study Approach, Richard J. Marshall

The practical implementation of hazard analysis and critical control point (HACCP) and in particular the definition of the critical control points (CCPs) in the food industry is usually a complex structured task. This is particularly the case of small medium enterprise (SMEs), where quality/safety manager ability, knowledge of the production processes and “sensitiveness” is usually the discriminate for the proper identification and prioritisation of risks.

The same applies for the definition of causes, which may lead to food safety hazards.

This paper addresses the issues of how quality/safety managers can objectively and automatically implement the first and second principles of hazard analysis in the application of HACCP, which is the identification of risk priorities and of the related CCPs, by means of a structured, quantitative and qualitative methodology. The proposed methodology combines fault tree analysis (FTA) approach, for the analytical decomposition of the relevant steps in the manufacturing process of a food product, and fuzzy logic, for quantitative measures of occurrence likelihood.

The practical implications of the methodology are finally tested through a real case application.

Keywords: Hazard analysis; Critical control point; HACCP; Food safety