Your draft plan has come back from the management company with one comment: "You have eighteen CCPs." You have made the classic mistake — calling everything critical. A plan with eighteen CCPs is a plan nobody monitors, and a plan nobody monitors is a plan that will not save you in front of an inspector.
What makes a control point critical
A CCP is a step at which control can be applied and is essential to prevent, eliminate or reduce a significant hazard to an acceptable level — and where, if you lose control, there is no later step that will catch it. Handwashing is essential, but it is a prerequisite, not a CCP. Cooking chicken is a CCP: nothing downstream will fix undercooked chicken.
The decision tree
Applied to each significant hazard at each step:
| Q | Question | If YES | If NO |
|---|---|---|---|
| Q1 | Is there a control measure at this step? | Go to Q2 | Is control necessary for safety? If yes, modify the step or process. If no, not a CCP |
| Q2 | Is the step specifically designed to eliminate or reduce the hazard to an acceptable level? | CCP | Go to Q3 |
| Q3 | Could contamination occur or increase to unacceptable levels here? | Go to Q4 | Not a CCP |
| Q4 | Will a later step eliminate or reduce the hazard to an acceptable level? | Not a CCP | CCP |
A yacht HACCP plan extract
| CCP | Hazard | Critical limit (widely-taught standard; confirm against your FSMS) | Monitoring — what/how/when/who | Corrective action |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Acceptance of chilled goods | Pathogen growth in transit | Core temperature 5°C or below (8°C ceiling in some jurisdictions) | Probe two items per chilled delivery, on arrival in galley, by chef or stew | Reject; record; notify supplier; review tender procedure |
| Cooking | Survival of Salmonella, Campylobacter, VTEC | Core 75°C for 30 seconds, or an equivalent combination (e.g. 70°C/2 min) | Probe thickest part of each batch, every batch, by cook | Continue cooking; re-probe; do not serve until limit met |
| Cooling of cooked food | C. perfringens / B. cereus spore germination and growth | From hot to 5°C or below within 90 minutes | Probe at start and end of cooling, every batch, by cook | Discard if exceeded; portion smaller; fix blast chiller |
| Hot holding | Growth and toxin formation | 63°C or above | Probe every hour during service, by stew | Reheat to 75°C once, or discard if held below limit for over 2 hours |
| Chilled storage | Listeria growth; general growth | 5°C or below | Read and record twice daily, plus alarm, by galley duty | Move stock; assess food by time/temperature history; discard if unproven |
Corrective action means two actions
- Deal with the affected food — quarantine, reprocess, or discard. Never guess. If the history is unknown, the food is unproven, and unproven means unsafe.
- Deal with the cause — why did the limit fail? A blocked condenser, a broken probe, an untrained crew member, an unrealistic procedure. Close it out and record it. A corrective action that only bins the food guarantees a repeat.
Onboard Notes
- Aim for a handful of genuine CCPs you monitor rigorously, not a wall of them you monitor nominally.
- Every critical limit must be measurable and have a reason. "As soon as possible" is not a limit.
- Calibrate probes and record it. An uncalibrated probe makes every monitoring record worthless.
Scope note: xplor is not an approved centre or an accredited training provider. This lesson is preparatory study only - no certificate and no regulated qualification is awarded here, and a Level 3 supervising food safety award must be sat and assessed with an approved centre of a regulated awarding organisation.