HACCP: certified, or on the way there?

It is one of the most common confusions when a company evaluates food service providers, and it almost always works in the provider's favour: "we work under HACCP" and "we are HACCP certified" sound alike and do not mean the same thing.

What each one is

HACCP — hazard analysis and critical control points — is a food safety management system: you identify the hazards in the process, determine the points where they can be controlled, set limits, monitor and keep records. An operator can implement it on their own, and frankly should.

Certification is something else: an independent third party audits that system and issues a certificate with a scope, a validity period and a number. Neither the operator nor their client issues it.

The practical consequence is that an operator may run a perfectly implemented HACCP plan without being certified, while another may say "HACCP" in a deck without having either. From the outside, in a sales meeting, all three look much the same.

How to tell them apart in five minutes

Without being a food safety specialist, and without visiting anything:

1. Ask for the certificate, not the mention. A real certificate names the certifying body and carries a number, a scope and an expiry date. If what arrives is a logo on a slide, it is not a certificate.
2. Read the scope. A certificate may cover a production plant and not the operation they are going to run at your site. The scope states exactly what is covered.
3. Ask whose name the sanitary permit is issued in. It is a separate document, issued by the health authority, and it applies to one specific establishment.
4. Ask for the records, not the manual. Anyone can produce a manual. What proves the system is alive are the temperature logs, the corrective actions and the signed verifications from the last few weeks.
5. Ask who audits it. If no external party audits it, it is not certification; it is self-monitoring — which is also valid, but it goes by a different name.

Where SAVIA stands today

We are not HACCP certified. We are implementing the system, and we call it a programme under way because that is exactly what it is. What we can put in writing before you sign anything is the operating model, the sanitary protocols, the team structure, the indicators the operation is measured by and the records that are kept.

We would rather say it this way, even knowing that a certified competitor holds a real advantage over us here. The alternative — leaving the word HACCP floating in a proposal for the reader to fill in the rest — is the kind of imprecision that comes due the moment someone audits it, and ends up costing more than the sale it won.