Food Safety Legislation

Food safety legislation changed on 1 January 2006. Regulation 852/2004 (EC) of the European Parliament and Council on the Hygiene of Food Stuffs now applies to all food businesses except primary producers. The Food Hygiene (England) Regulations 2006, has also come into force.

On the 29 April 2004, the European Parliament and the Council, issued Regulation (EC) No 852/2004 on the hygiene of foodstuffs.

Article 5 states that: Food business operators shall put into place, implement and maintain a permanent procedure based on the principles of hazard analysis critical control points (HACCP). The HACCP principles referred to above consist of the following:

• Identifying any hazards that must be prevented, eliminated or reduced to acceptable levels
• Identifying the critical control points at the step or steps at which control is essential to prevent or eliminate a hazard or to reduce it to acceptable levels
• Establishing critical limits at critical control points that separate acceptability from unacceptability for the prevention, elimination or reduction of identified hazards
• Establishing and implementing effective monitoring procedures at critical control points
• Establishing corrective actions when monitoring indicates that a critical control point is not under control
• Establishing procedures, which shall be carried out regularly, to verify that the measures outlined in the above paragraphs
• Establishing documents and records commensurate with the nature and size of the food business to demonstrate the effective application of the measures outlined in the above paragraphs

When any modification is made in the product, process, or any step, food business operators shall review the procedure and make the necessary changes to it.

Food Safety Training

Chapter 12 states that food business operators are to ensure that: "food handlers are supervised and instructed and/or trained in food hygiene matters commensurate with their work activity; that those responsible for the development and maintenance of the procedure referred to in Article 5 (1) of the Regulation or for the operation of relevant guides have received adequate training in the application of the HACCP principles, and compliance with any requirement of national law concerning training programmes for persons working in certain food sectors".

Managers who are responsible for maintaining a food safety management system will require adequate training to enable them to carry out the statutory requirement.