In a live World Food Safety Day event today, FAO offered a first peek at a new website: “FAO’s GHP and HACCP Toolbox for Food Safety”. GHP – or Good Hygienic Practices - are well established practices for keeping food safe along the food supply chain. They underpin the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point, or HACCP, food safety management system. FAO has worked with international experts to develop the guidance materials for this new website, which is designed to help all those in the food chain apply both GHP and HACCP more effectively.

To start the event, two experts gave some background information on GHP and HACCP and why it is important to  be making this toolbox available now. Sarah Cahill, Senior Food Standards Officer for the Codex Alimentarius Commission Secretariat outlined the history of GHP and HACCP, explaining that they are both features of the Codex General Principles of Food Hygiene, first adopted in 1969. Catherine Bessy, Senior Food Safety Officer at FAO, then went on to emphasize the challenges that some food companies have, especially when adapting their practices to changing food technologies, thus compromising any HACCP plans they may have in place. Indeed, she noted that the implementation of GHP poses some of the biggest challenges, especially for some of the smallest food business operators, such as street vendors. “This toolbox is a great step forward in helping operators make the right choices,” she said.

Moderator, Christine Kopko, FAO Food Safety Officer, then spoke with Dr Keith Warriner, Professor of Food Science at the University of Guelph in Canada, who with his team, helped develop the guidance materials within the tool. He talked about the challenges involved in developing a set of materials for such a broad global, cross-sectoral audience. The toolbox “gives people a pathway to learning, rather than being prescriptive,” he said, explaining that it takes Codex guidelines and presents them in “small packages” of information, making it easier to understand. “By making it easier to understand you make it easier to implement,” he noted.

Kopko then spoke with Silvia Vanessa Camacho Martinez, Graduate Student in Food Science, University of Guelph, an industrial engineer from Bolivia (Plurinational State of) and former HACCP coordinator in the poultry industry. Her industry experience helped her to understand how best to present this complex set of materials in a digestible way. She said that the online access “through just a couple of clicks” and the colour-coded structure are all designed to make the toolbox as accessible as possible to the widest possible range of users.

Following a brief video demonstrating how to use the toolbox, Cornelia Boesch, Food Safety Officer at FAO spoke with Lazaro Msasalaga, Director of Quality Management at the Tanzania Bureau of Standards, who was involved in a multi-year programme that FAO carried out in the United Republic of Tanzania. The programme saw a number of institutions working with smallholders and small businesses to improve food safety along value chains. Under the One UN initiative, the Tanzania National Food Safety Task Force had asked FAO to implement a series of training of trainers courses on internationally recognized, Codex-based systems of food safety and quality management. 

“Thanks to the application of standards, different actors in the agri-food system can operate according to commonly agreed practices and definitions,” he said. “The FAO toolbox we are presenting today incorporates learning and feedback from the trainees who conducted more than 800 training events with an outreach to more than 2500 food chain operators in one year. They demonstrated tangible improvements to hygienic standards of food businesses, which contributed to enhancing food safety and quality, market access, and consumer health.”

A  number of questions were taken from the audience in the Sheikh Zayed Centre at FAO and from online viewers.

Closing remarks were given by Jocelyn Brown Hall, Director of the FAO Liaison Office for North America. She underlined the significance of this new toolbox. “GHP are the gold standard in the field,” she said. “The toolbox makes these easier and more user-friendly … This is an exciting day for food safety.”

Visit the FAO GHP and HACCP Toolbox

Photo © FAO