HACCP is a systematic approach to food safety consisting of 7 principles, which is as follows:

1. Analyze hazards. Potential hazards associated with a food and measures to control those hazards are identified. The hazard could be biological, such as a microbe; chemical, such as a toxin; or physical, such as ground glass or metal fragments.
2. Identify critical control points. These are points in a food's production from its raw state through processing and shipping to consumption by the consumer at which the potential hazard can be controlled or eliminated. Examples are cooking, cooling, packaging, and metal detection.
3. Establish preventive measures with critical limits for each control point. For a cooked food, for example, this might include setting the minimum cooking temperature and time required to ensure the elimination of any harmful microbes.
4. Establish procedures to monitor the critical control points. Such procedures might include determining how and by whom cooking time and temperature should be monitored.
5. Establish cor rective actions to be taken when monitor ing shows that a critical limit has not been met for example, reprocessing or disposing of food if the minimum cooking temperature is not met.
6. Establish procedures to ver ify that the system is working properly for example, testing time-and-temperature recording devices to verify that a cooking unit is working properly.
7. Establish effect ive recordkeeping to document the HACCP system. T his would include records of hazards and their control methods, the monitoring of safety requirements and action taken to correct potential problems.