Hello Dpu
It's my first day in here - I like what I see - so many nice folks sharing their expertise so I'm typing a bit in trepidation of Mr Charls with over 4200 posts to his credit - so I'll be careful and respectful ...
But my friend, HACCP is a process and you can apply it to all sorts of situations - all in much the same way - and always its a journey not a destination.
From your short note - perhaps it's finding the start place that troubles you ... I know that's always our problem when we look at a new product / process / package and try to get our HACCP plan in place ... so here is the approach we take - I hope it helps you ...may I apologise in advance to you and all the experts out there if I've over simplified ...
1. Deconstruct your product into components, food, packaging, things that get in from your services (air, steam, water etc), list teh waste streams too
2. Deconstruct your process, starting with the purchase of ingredients, packaging and all the stuff in 1, detail exactly how you make ketchup and end with delivery. Draw a flow diagram with all the inputs and outputs (including waste)
3. Start with your existing set of Hazard Analyses & Risk Assessments (HARAs) and see which apply, then stand well back and see if there are other situations that may occur that lead to a need for new HARAs
4. Set out (tabulate in the time honoured way) all the HARAs that apply and run through the decision tree to see if they can be controlled by pre-requisites (from your exiting or suddenly expaned set), Control points or Critical Control Points. When you have identified them, set out the control limits and the measures you need to take to achieve the control you need for food safety, food qualilty and regulatory compliance
5. Now draw up forms to capture the data, write up Standard Operating Procedures to make sure you (and all your folks) know how to achieve control, schedule audits to verify the controls are maintained and then take another step back and run through it all again to verify everything is there and it accurately represents your process
In our experiences, we have looked for a short route to a HACCP plan - we've only ever found short cuts made up of country miles (UK miles that are 4 times longer than highway miles!). There are no short cuts. It's one of those things where the jhourney is as important as the destination.
When you've gone thorugh steps 1 to 5 (and I'm very sure you'll find as many sub-steps as I'm sure I've skipped), then you will have arrived ready to take control of your processes.
From my limited knowledge of ketchup, the most likely risks are associated with:
physical & chemical contamination / cross contamination from ingredients, packaging, equipment, cleaingin, other processes - all the usual sources (sauces!!)
microbiological contamination associated with higher than expected intial populations or organisms you do't expect (look out for tomatoes - there are acid tolerant and heat resistant spoilage organisms about that go for tomatoes - and with respect, find out from an expert not me!), delays whilst things are hot and not yet commercially sterile (that incubate populations), under processing during cooking, pH / brix variations that change your end-game micro, cooker variations that produce process deviations and cooling variations that may also incubate survivors and will influence product quality if cooling doesn't arrest cooking fast enough. So do lots of pre-production micro (before & after processing so you know what your process achieved), run time / temperature studies to establsi the slowest heating (and cooling) point in your container and to understand the variation in delivered lethality of your thermal processes (lethal rate summations will be fine).
How will you determnine shelf life - you will need to provide a BBE date, if it's an entirley new product, you will have to take advice - our rule is always to halve the expected life until that amount of time has passed and we have hard evidence to increase it - so make sure your first production is used up in life trials so you have plenty of samples!
... and so here I bow to the collective wisdom of the most venerable members ... in particular Mr Charles - becasue of course he's right - it depends on your process and product - but I hope I have given you a place to start and haven't insulted your inteligence ...
kind regards and lots of luck ...
Graham
