FSMA Fridays: Risk Assessment Best Practices And Implementing Preventive Controls (Part Three Of Four)

Check out Part One and Part Two of this series

In the second portion of FSMA Fridays: Risk Assessment Best Practices And Implementing Preventive Controls, Levin and the Acheson Group panel discussed how food-producing companies can determine and address what their significant hazards are, as well as discussing the FDA’s expectations of risk mitigation and preventive controls. Here, in part three, the group will discuss how companies can enhance their current risk-assessment or hazard-analysis programs to make them HARPC compliant as well as addressing the issue of FSMA deadlines related to risk assessment. Additionally, the panel will begin answering questions from the webinar’s live audience.

Barbara: David, let’s come back to you. How can companies enhance their current risk-assessment or hazard-analysis programs that they have in place for HACCP and make those HARPC compliant?

David: Barbara, that’s the million dollar question… “I’ve got HACCP, am I good?” “I don’t understand HARPC, what’s it all about?” I think that many companies have approached food safety along HACCP principles. It’s a widely used, but not universally used approach, and FSMA is going to essentially require everybody to be thinking from a risk-based perspective.

I think the FDA was very specific about not putting language in FSMA preventive controls saying everybody is required to have a HACCP plan. That language doesn’t exist. They want us to evolve to thinking risk-based assessment, and that’s complicated. If you’re a big facility and you’ve got lots of experience and your quality-assurance folks and food-safety folks got lots of experience in food safety, you know exactly what this is about.

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