Your HACCP plan is current. Your team follows the procedures. Your critical control points are monitored. But when the auditor arrives, it’s not your process they evaluate first — it’s your documentation.
The Seven HACCP Principles and Their Documentation
- Conduct a hazard analysis. Document the written hazard analysis identifying biological, chemical, and physical hazards.
- Determine Critical Control Points. Document each CCP with what’s being controlled and why.
- Establish critical limits. Document specific, measurable limits for each CCP.
- Establish monitoring procedures. Document what is monitored, how, how often, and by whom.
- Establish corrective actions. Document procedures and records of every corrective action taken.
- Establish verification procedures. Document calibration records, review logs, testing results.
- Establish record-keeping. Document the complete system itself.
The Records Auditors Look At
- Daily monitoring records. Temperature logs, sanitiser checks, metal detector verification. Auditors check that records exist for every production day and are contemporaneous.
- Corrective action records. Evidence that deviations were caught and addressed. Having corrective actions is actually a good sign — it means monitoring works.
- Calibration records. Every monitoring instrument needs documented calibration at defined intervals.
- HACCP plan review. Annual review documentation showing the plan was evaluated and updated.
Where Documentation Breaks Down
The gap is usually between what your team does and what they document. Production staff follow the HACCP plan every day. The paperwork doesn’t always keep up. Handwritten logs get incomplete during busy shifts. Calibration records fall behind. The HACCP plan review happens but doesn’t get formally documented.
Making Documentation a Byproduct, Not a Project
The most effective approach is to make HACCP documentation a byproduct of your normal operations rather than a separate activity. When your production system records batch data, temperatures, and lot information as part of the production workflow, the HACCP records generate themselves.
How FlexiBake Helps
FlexiBake maintains HACCP-related documentation as a byproduct of production tracking. When a batch runs, the production data — temperatures, times, lot numbers, operator actions — becomes the documentation your HACCP plan requires. Audit-ready reports generate on demand.