HACCP is food manufacturing's gold standard.
When you buy a prepared food product, you put your trust in the product and the company that manufactures it. A legitimate question to ask is: how do I know this food product is safe and what are the manufacturing procedures that ensure its safety?
Food safety standards in manufacturing facilities have emerged gradually and have finally reached a point where standards are enforced domestically and internationally. The market is aware of the dangers of poor food manufacturing—food poising that can result in illness or even death.
The food safety standard movement began, arguably, with the need for safety assurance in food manufactured for astronauts in the 1960’s. As American began sending men into space, they wanted to be able to monitor the quality of the food that those astronauts were eating to make sure that the men wouldn’t experience any food poisoning symptoms while they were in confined capsules in space.
To meet this need for safe manufactured food, Pillsbury pioneered the Hazard Analysis-Critical Control Points (HACCP, pronounced Hassup) protocol, which is a method for analyzing the physical, chemical and sanitation hazards inherent to food manufacturing processes. By the 1970’s, Pillsbury had incorporatd these programs into their plants as a standard for all food production, and by the 1990’s, similar standards were implemented in almost every plant around the world.
Another simple food safety practice that we are familiar with are hour codes—the automatically printed timestamp on food packaging. Depending on the vulnerability of the food product to hazards in production, product may be pulled from the line multiple times every hour, once a day, or at the interval determined appropriate by food safety experts. Most of the time, the product that is pulled is clean and shows no abnormal composition. However, if there is abnormality, then hour codes tell the manufacturing team what amount of food to pull from distribution—anything produced between the hazardous sampling and the last normal sampling.
Although these processes have emerged gradually, they’re now the standards that we expected whenever we buy manufactured food product in America and around the world.