Control Measures Assessment

Dear Colleagues,

The following requirement of ISO 22000, requires assessment of control measure. During my application I suggested to assess the control measures according to the given criteria, giving each criteria certain weight and finally giving each control measure certain score.

Could we say "e.g. for the food safety hazard with the 80% significance, we can use control measure of score not less that 90%".

What do you think about this methodology?

Regards,

Jessamine

7.4.4 Selection and assessment of control measures

Based on the hazard assessment of 7.4.3, an appropriate combination of control measures shall be selected which is capable of preventing, eliminating or reducing these food safety hazards to defined acceptable levels.

In this selection, each of the control measures as described in 7.3.5.2 shall be reviewed with respect to its effectiveness against the identified food safety hazards.

The control measures selected shall be categorized as to whether they need to be managed through operational PRP(s) or by the HACCP plan.

The selection and categorization shall be carried out using a logical approach that includes assessments with regard to the following:

a) its effect on identified food safety hazards relative to the strictness applied;

b) its feasibility for monitoring (e.g. ability to be monitored in a timely manner to enable immediate corrections);

c) its place within the system relative to other control measures;

d) the likelihood of failure in the functioning of a control measure or significant processing variability;

e) the severity of the consequence(s) in the case of failure in its functioning;

f) whether the control measure is specifically established and applied to eliminate or significantly reduce the level of hazard(s);

g) synergistic effects (i.e. interaction that occurs between two or more measures resulting in their combined effect being higher than the sum of their individual effects).

Control measures categorized as belonging to the HACCP plan shall be implemented in accordance with 7.6.

Other control measures shall be implemented as operational PRPs according to 7.5.

The methodology and parameters used for this categorization shall be described in documents, and the results of the assessment shall be recorded.

Dear Colleagues,

The following requirement of ISO 22000, requires assessment of control measure. During my application I suggested to assess the control measures according to the given criteria, giving each criteria certain weight and finally giving each control measure certain score.

Could we say "e.g. for the food safety hazard with the 80% significance, we can use control measure of score not less that 90%".

What do you think about this methodology?

Regards,

Jessamine

Dear Jessamine

I’m not an ISO22k user however yr query looks analogous to the problem of making quantitative or qualitative risk assessments. The former tends to be regarded as an ideal solution but the hard data is frequently non-existent so validation is a problem ( not that the latter option is simple but it does allows some [creative] flexibility). Nonetheless, if you think you can justify the numbers, why not?
Am interested to see if anybody has tried yr suggestion.

Rgds / Charles.C