HACCP: shared responsiblity for success

"HACCP is nothing without trainers," declared Dagmar Engel, HACCP trainer and consultant from Germany, at the recentInternational Food Safety Focus conference, co-hosted by the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health​, held in London at the end of October.

In her presentation she explained the problems encountered when attempting to put into practice a thorough and effectiveHACCP system in the workplace.

Dagmar's experience of modern-day HACCP is that trainers do not understandthe in-depth philosophy behind the subject and students suffer as a resultof poor application once in the workplace scenario. She has found that inmany cases HACCP is not working because the system is too theoretical and ithas been over-complicated by sophisticated terminology from a managementlevel.

Dagmar added that by the time the HACCP system is implemented at ground level, users do not have an accurate understanding of the motives and consequences of HACCP in the food-handling setting.

Poor reference to practical experience was also cited as a problem in HACCP training. Avoiding the use of real-life examples only serves to communicate to the student that HACCP is an academic model designed to make their jobs moredifficult, Dagmar continued.

In the final section of her presentation, Dagmar laid out her 'mortal sins'of HACCP training: one-sided lecturing, neglecting the preliminaries, makingassumptions about student knowledge, focusing on over complex terminology,concentrating on product specific models rather than process specific modelsand getting lost in a forest of decision trees.

She showed that trainers toooften deliver the same training course, regardless of their audience. Dagmar emphasised that demonstrating the importance of HACCP to a butcher should be quite a different experience to the way a director of a multi-national foodprocessor should be trained. Both will have quite different personal experiences of the food industry and both will have different objectives. The way HACCP training is delivered should be tailored accordingto the audience.

In conclusion, Dagmar maintained that everybody has to make their own contribution to ensure that HACCP is successful and that no one individual ordepartment should be held responsible for it. As a reflection of her common sense approach Dagmar added that too often the quality team is put in complete control of product safety, when in fact everybody, from the cleaning staff to the production manager, has a responsibility for HACCP quality.