Developing a HACCP handwashing plan is crucial since personal hygiene is a potential hazard to ensuring food safety. Neglecting employee personal hygiene can result in dangerous pathogens entering the production area and contaminating food products, endangering customers and damaging the brand's reputation.
What are the 7 steps of a HACCP handwashing plan?
1. Conduct a Hazard Analysis
Hazard analysis is the first step of any HACCP handwashing plan, it is important to know where potential risks to food products are in your facility. The main hazard related to handwashing and personal hygiene is the risk of an employee or visitor entering the production zone with contaminated hands and touching products, potentially contaminating the product.
2. Identify Critical Control Points
The critical control point in a HACCP plan is where the hazard is managed to ensure food safety. For handwashing, this is at the entrances and exits of production areas, where employees and visitors must wash their hands to remove pathogens.
Unsure where your hygiene critical control points are? Ask us for a site survey!
3. Establish Critical Limits
Critical limits in a HACCP plan is the correct procedure for addressing the hazards in the critical control points. For HACCP plans related more directly to food, one example of a critical limit is ensuring that ready to eat (RTE) chicken is cooked to a minimum internal temperature of 165 degrees Fahrenheit. The critical limit for handwashing should be to reduce the amount of harmful pathogens on employee and visitors hands to as close to zero as possible before entering the production area. This is limit is met by having every person entering production conduct a thorough hand wash.
4. Monitor Critical Control Points
Monitoring critical control points is essential in a HACCP handwashing plan to ensure that employees are washing their hands every time they enter and exit production. For a manual sink, designating a staff member to observe that employees and visitors are washing their hands is the best way to monitor the critical control point. For CleanTech® EVO Automated Handwashing Stations, there is hygiene compliance data that can be access to monitor handwashing station use, allowing facilities to not have a designated hand wash monitoring staff member.
5. Establish Corrective Actions
When a critical control point is being observed not complying with a critical limit, corrective actions must be taken. If proper handwashing procedures have not been observed, the corrective actions could be retraining employees on handwashing processes or educating employees and visitors on the importance of handwashing in supplying customers with safe food products. For facilities with Automated Hygiene equipment, the stations are easy to use making employee training and any necessary corrective actions simple. For additional support with training download the HACCP-Based Automated Handwashing SOP Resource.
6. Establish Verification Procedures
Periodically, you need to review and verify if all established steps in your process are operating according to the plan. This may include a review of your handwashing records, equipment maintenance, or checking that the handwashing procedures have their intended effect. The best way to verify that handwashing is removing the harmful pathogens is by ATP testing. To learn more about how to conduct and analyze an ATP test, visit our downloadable ATP testing guide here.
7. Establish Record Keeping Procedures
The last, but not least important, step is record-keeping - a complete documentation of your plan and procedures. The records help you to analyze any possible problem areas and show how well you have been doing at preventing hazards and ensure safe product for your customers.
Automated Handwashing Stations make HACCP handwashing plans easy
CleanTech® EVO Automated Handwashing Stations fit perfectly into any HACCP handwashing plan. Available in wall-mounted, free-standing, and high-capacity models, these stations can be installed at the entrances and exits of production zones to address the hazard of employees and visitors entering production with dirty hands by offering a clinically proven removal of 99.9% of harmful pathogens in just a 12-second hand wash cycle. Record keeping can be made easy with the hygiene compliance tracking data screen, showing how many hand washes were preformed on any given day. These features of the Automated Hygiene equipment make following a HACCP handwashing plan easy, allowing your team to feel comfortable and safe while producing high quality food products.
Learn more about HACCP and Automated Handwashing Stations here!
