About the Course Manual
This course manual and accompanying generic HACCP plans and overheads were developed by the Juice HACCP Alliance — a group comprised of federal and state food-inspection officials, university food-science educators and juice-industry representatives. The course was designed to meet the HACCP training requirements established under 21 CFR Part 120.13 of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's mandatory juice HACCP inspection program.
Part 120.13 requires that certain HACCP activities must be completed by a "HACCP-trained individual." A HACCP-trained individual is one who has successfully completed training in the application of HACCP to juice products (at least equivalent to that received under a "standardized curriculum" recognized by FDA) or has acquired the knowledge through job experience. The Juice HACCP Alliance course is the standardized curriculum by which FDA will evaluate other training courses.
Maintaining Course Integrity
Because this course will be used to evaluate HACCP-training equivalency, it is imperative that course instructors adhere to the course format and material to the extent possible. The course is divided into three components. The first teaches the student the seven principles of HACCP. The second component explains the juice HACCP regulations and guidance materials available to help develop a HACCP plan. The last component is a class exercise where students are divided into small groups and asked to conduct a hazard analysis and develop a HACCP plan for one or more processing models, like those found in Appendix IV. Each of these components is necessary to give students an adequate foundation to establish their company’s HACCP mandate. Instructors are urged not to delete the material in the course because this defeats the course objective of standardizing the training experience. However, instructors may wish to augment the course with examples pertinent to their region.
It is noteworthy that component one, dealing with the seven principles, was designed to address the HACCP training needs for any FDA-regulated food product. In some instances, non juice product examples are used to demonstrate the application of HACCP principles. Additional discussion on juice specific hazards is provided in the Juice HACCP Hazards and Controls Guide published by the FDA, separate from this training curriculum.
Tools for Developing HACCP Plans
The course material incorporates teaching tools to assist students in conducting a hazard analysis and developing a HACCP plan. A fictional juice processing firm (the XYZ Juice Co.) that produces refrigerated pasteurized apple juice is used to illustrate how a HACCP plan may be developed. It is important that instructors understand (and that they help students understand) that the model developed for XYZ Juice Co. as well as other models are illustrative. The Juice HACCP Alliance does not suggest that the models represent the only way or necessarily the best way to develop HACCP plans for the products in question.
A hazard-analysis worksheet is introduced in Chapter 5. In Chapter 6, a decision tree is used to help determine which steps in the production of refrigerated pasteurized apple juice are critical control points (CCPs). It must be remembered that tools such as the decision tree are not perfect since not all products and processes fit neatly into the tree. In some circumstances, the decision tree may not lead to an appropriateanswer.Students must be taught to factor in all pertinent data and information about the plant operation and the characteristics of the product to determine if and where a CCP exists.
The development of XYZ Juice Co.'s HACCP plan continues in Chapters 7 to 11. A HACCP plan form is used to identify critical limits, monitoring activity, corrective actions, verification procedures and records associated with the CCPs. The forms and worksheets are completed step-by-step as the instructor covers each chapter. The manual provides the forms and worksheets along with responses. Instructors are urged to have students use the blank worksheets and forms found in Appendix IX to fill in their own answers before turning to the completed forms in the manual. Students may then be instructed to check their answers against those found at the end of each chapter.
