HACCP plan: draft and approve your food safety plan

Before you start

• Switch on the module in Extensions, HACCP plan card. It’s free. Unlike HACCP records, this module does need to be switched on.
• Set up the processes in your recipes (see Process control): without them, the flow diagram starts out almost empty.
• Check your locations (critical points are linked to an existing location) and your suppliers, with their tax ID and health registration number: they go in as an annex to the manual.

1. Generate the draft

Go to HACCP › HACCP plan and click Generate my plan. Enter:

• Plan name (it comes as “HACCP plan” with the year) and Scope: what activity it covers, in one line (“Pastry production and retail sales”).
• Plan type: Full, with monitored critical control points (the one a certification asks for), or Simplified, for small businesses, where good hygiene practices replace monitoring of critical points. It can only be changed while the plan is a draft.
• Products to include: one representative recipe from each process family. Ten products that go through the same stages share a single analysis; the screen tells you how many different processes it detects.

Recipok creates the plan as a draft with the twelve prerequisites, one card per family and its flow diagram. The step bar guides you: Prerequisites › Products › Flow diagram › Hazards and CCPs › Approve.

2. The twelve prerequisites

Water · Cleaning and disinfection · Pest control · Maintenance and premises · Cold chain · Staff training and hygiene · Waste · Suppliers and raw materials · Traceability · Allergen management · Food safety culture · Food redistribution. In each block: whether it Applies, How we do it (what you really do), Responsible (a named person) and Frequency (“daily”, “weekly”). Each block saves itself when you leave the field.

Draft with AI suggests a starting text for the empty blocks based on your locations, your recording routines and your products. At this step it doesn’t use up scans. Read it and correct it: the suggested text stays flagged for review until you edit it.

3. Product cards and flow diagram

Each card comes with the composition, allergens and products it covers already deduced. Fill in the six fields: heat treatment, packaging, shelf life, storage, intended use and intended consumer, and click Save description. Tick Intended for vulnerable groups if you sell to schools, hospitals or care homes: it changes the hazard analysis. Fill in with AI suggests the empty fields and uses one scan from your document reading balance (with the extended version, it doesn’t). With Add another product to the plan you include another family.

Click Review diagram and hazards. Recipok puts the stages in order (Goods-in › Storage › Preparation › Packaging › Dispatch) and you can rename them, change their type, add, remove and reorder them. Then walk round the production area with the tablet and click Confirm on site for each stage. If you edit a stage that has already been confirmed, it loses its confirmation.

4. Hazards and critical control points

At each stage you decide what could go wrong. Hazards come from three places: See suggested hazards (the library, free), Propose hazards with AI (one scan per stage, except with the extended version) or Add manually. For each one you enter the type (biological, chemical, physical, allergen or fraud), severity and likelihood, the control measure, the justification and the answers to the Codex decision tree. Recipok works out whether it’s a prerequisite, an operational prerequisite or a CCP.

A CCP needs a critical limit, monitoring and a corrective action. If the recipe already has that check, Use this limit copies it. When you approve each hazard, it’s signed with your name and the date.

Turn a CCP into daily monitoring

A critical point that isn’t monitored is just paper. Choose one of these two routes, which are mutually exclusive:

5. Approve the plan and download the manual

Click Approve the plan. If anything is missing, Recipok tells you what. Enter the Plan signatures (name, position; the management signature is mandatory). On approval, the cards, the diagram and the hazards are frozen and the next review is set for one year later. Then Download the manual appears: cover, methodology, prerequisites, one section per product with its diagram and hazard analysis, signatures, and annexes of approved suppliers and training (with Record training given you note each training session). The manual can always be downloaded, even if your subscription changes.

Reviews

Review the plan at least once a year and whenever a product, a process or a supplier changes, or after an incident. Recipok emails you 30 days before the review date and reminds you if you’ve added suppliers since the last signature. With Open a revision and a stated reason, the approved version is kept and an editable copy is created with the next version number; the on-site confirmations have to be done again.