Managing Food Safety: A Regulator's Manual For Applying HACCP Principles to Risk-based Retail and Food Service Inspections and Evaluating Voluntary Food Safety Management Systems

Table of Contents

Glossary

ACCEPTABLE LEVEL means the presence of a food safety hazard at levels low enough not to cause an illness or injury.

ACTIVE MANAGERIAL CONTROL means the purposeful incorporation of specific actions or procedures by industry management into the operation of their business to attain control over foodborne illness risk factors.

COMPETITIVE MICROFLORA means the microorganisms naturally present in potentially hazardous food that compete with pathogens for the available water, nutrients, and oxygen.

CONTAMINATION means the unintended presence of potentially harmful substances, including microorganisms, chemicals, and physical objects in food.

CONTROL MEASURE means any action or activity that can be used to prevent, eliminate, or reduce an identified hazard. Control measures determined to be essential for food safety are applied at critical control points in the flow of food.

CORRECTIVE ACTION means an activity that is conducted by a person when a critical limit is not met.

CRITICAL CONTROL POINT (CCP) means an operational step in a food preparation process at which control can be applied and is essential to prevent or eliminate a food safety hazard or reduce it to an acceptable level.

CRITICAL LIMIT means one or more prescribed parameters that must be met to ensure that food safety hazards are controlled at a CCP.

CROSS-CONTAMINATION means the transfer of harmful substances or disease-causing microorganisms to food by hands, food-contact surfaces, sponges, cloth towels, and utensils that touch raw food, are not cleaned, and then touch ready-to-eat foods. Cross-contamination can also occur when raw food touches or drips onto cooked or ready-to-eat foods.

DANGER ZONE means the temperature range between 5 °C (41 °F) and 57 °C (135 °F) that favors the growth of pathogenic bacteria.

DEVIATION means a failure to meet a required critical limit for a critical control point.

EXCLUDE means to prevent a person from working as a food employee or entering a food establishment except for those areas open to the general public.

EXTRINSIC FACTORS OF FOOD means the factors that people can readily control involving food, such as temperature, acidity, and availability of oxygen.

FOOD PREPARATION PROCESS means the series of operational steps conducted to produce a food ready to be consumed, i.e. Preparation of Ready-to-eat Food with No Cook Step, Preparation for Same Day Service, and Complex Food Preparation.

FOODBORNE ILLNESS means illness resulting from the consumption of foods or beverages contaminated with disease-causing microorganisms, chemicals, or other harmful substances.

FOODBORNE OUTBREAK means the occurrence of two or more cases of a similar illness resulting from the ingestion of a common food.

HAZARD means a biological, chemical, or physical property that may cause a food to be unsafe for human consumption.

HAZARD ANALYSIS AND CRITICAL CONTROL POINT (HACCP) means a prevention-based food safety system that identifies and monitors specific food safety hazards that can adversely affect the safety of food products.

HACCP PLAN means a written document that is based on the principles of HACCP and that describes the procedures to be followed to ensure the control of a specific process or procedure.

HACCP SYSTEM means the result of the implementation of the HACCP plan. A HACCP system includes the HACCP plan and all the prerequisite programs.

HIGHLY SUSCEPTIBLE POPULATION (HSP) means persons who are more likely than other populations to experience foodborne disease because they are either immunocompromised, preschool age children (infants or toddlers), or older adults.

INFECTIOUS MICROORGANISMS means pathogenic bacteria, viruses, or parasites, that when ingested, cause foodborne illness in humans.

INTRINSIC FACTORS OF FOOD means the factors that are inherent to the food and are not readily controlled by people in a retail facility, such as water activity, nutrient content, and competitive microflora.

MICROORGANISM means a form of life that can be seen only with a microscope including bacteria, viruses, yeast, and single-celled animals.

MONITORING means the act of observing and making measurements to help determine if critical limits are being met and maintained.

OPERATIONAL STEP means an activity or stage in the flow of food through a food establishment such as receiving, storage, preparation, cooking, etc.

PARASITE means an organism that lives on or in another usually larger host organism in a manner that harms or is of no advantage to the host. Parasites, like T. spiralis or T. gondii, do not grow in food, only inside of the body once ingested.

PATHOGEN means a microorganism (bacterium, parasite, virus, or fungi) that causes disease in humans.

PATHOGENIC LOAD means the expected amount of pathogens on a raw product, i.e. amount of Salmonella on chicken.

PERSON IN CHARGE means the individual present at a food establishment who is responsible for the operation at the time of inspection.

pH means the measure of the acidity of a product.

POTENTIALLY HAZARDOUS FOOD (PHF) means a natural or synthetic food that requires temperature control because it is in a form capable of supporting:

• The rapid and progressive growth of infectious or toxigenic microorganisms;
• The growth and toxin formation of Clostridium botulinum; or
• In raw shell eggs, the growth of Salmonella Enteritidis.

PHF includes:

• animal food (a food of animal origin) that is raw or heat treated
• a food of plant-origin that is heat-treated or consists of raw seed sprouts
• cut melons
• garlic-in-oil mixtures that are not modified in a way that results in mixtures that do not support the growth of pathogenic microorganisms

PREREQUISITE PROGRAMS means procedures such as Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) that address basic operational and sanitation conditions in an establishment.

READY-TO-EAT (RTE) FOOD means:

• raw animal foods that have been properly cooked;
• fish intended for raw consumption that has been frozen to destroy parasites;
• raw fruits and vegetables that are washed;
• fruits and vegetables that are cooked for hot holding;
• plant food for which further washing, cooking, or other processing is not required for food safety, and from which rinds, peels, husks, or shells, if naturally present, are removed;
• substances derived from plants such as spices, seasonings, and sugar
• a bakery item such as bread, cakes, pies, fillings, or icing for which further cooking is not required for food safety;
• dry, fermented sausages, such as dry salami or pepperoni;
• salt-cured meat and poultry products, such as prosciutto ham, country-cured ham, and Parma ham; and
• dried meat and poultry products, (such as jerky or beef sticks) and low acid foods that have been thermally processed and packaged in hermetically sealed containers.

RESTRICT means to limit the activities of a food employee so that there is no risk of transmitting a disease that is transmittable through food and so that the food employee does not work with exposed food, clean equipment, utensils, linens, or unwrapped single-service or single-use articles.

RISK CONTROL PLAN (RCP) means a concisely written management plan developed by the retail or food service operator with input from the health inspector that describes a management system for controlling specific out-of-control risk factors.

RISK FACTOR means one of the broad categories of contributing factors to foodborne illness outbreaks, as identified in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Surveillance Report for 1993-1997, that directly relates to foodborne safety concerns within retail and food service establishments. The factors are Food from Unsafe Sources, Inadequate Cooking Temperatures, Improper Holding Temperatures, Contaminated Equipment, and Poor Personal Hygiene.

SEVERITY means the seriousness of the effect(s) of a hazard.

SPORE means a very tough, dormant form of certain bacterial cells that is very resistant to desiccation, heat, and a variety of chemical and radiation treatments that are otherwise lethal to vegetative cells.

SPORE-FORMER means a bacterium capable of producing spores under adverse conditions.

Spore-formers in food include Clostridium botulinum, Bacillus cereus, and Clostridium perfringens.

STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE (SOP) means a written method of controlling a practice in accordance with predetermined specifications to obtain a desired outcome.

TOXIGENIC MICROORGANISM means pathogenic bacteria that causes foodborne illness in humans due to the ingestion of toxins produced in food.

Toxigenic microorganisms in food include Staphylococcus aureus, Bacillus cereus, and Clostridium botulinum.

VALIDATION means, for the purpose of this Manual, to focus on scientific and technical information to determine if the food safety management system in place will effectively control the food safety hazards once implemented.

VEGETATIVE CELL means a bacterial cell which is capable of actively growing.

VERIFICATION means those activities, other than monitoring, that determine the validity of the HACCP plan and show that the system is operating according to the plan.

VIRUS means a submicroscopic parasite consisting of nucleic acid (DNA or RNA) surrounded by a protein coat, and sometimes also encased in a lipid and glycoprotein envelope. Viruses are completely dependent on a living host cell to survive and multiply, and therefore can not multiply in or on food.

WATER ACTIVITY (A_w) means the quotient of the water vapor pressure of the substance, divided by the vapor pressure of pure water at the same temperature. Generally speaking, it is the amount of water available in the product to allow bacteria to live and grow.