-------------------- TRUCKING FOOD SAFETY PROGRAM --------------------

Because of globalization, the journey our food may take from its origin to our tables can be a prolonged one with many stops along the way. If food safety is compromised at any given step, we as consumers are in danger of contracting food borne illnesses.  To ensure that consumers are protected, food safety measures are being put in place at the different links involved in the food chain. The Canadian Trucking Alliance (CTA) developed the Trucking Food Safety Program in partnership with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. The program’s goal is to deliver a practical, cost-effective and results-orientated program for ensuring food safety within Canada ’s trucking community.

Food produced in Canada alone can travel many hundreds of miles and pass through many hands to reach our grocery-store shelves. If we look at the diagram below, one sector stands out as most prominent, the transportation industry.

In the above diagram, every grey arrow represents a movement of products by truck.

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Trucks transport 80-90% of all consumer products and foodstuffs that move within Canada and North America . Although the trucking industry has not been identified as a significant source of contamination of food borne illness, the Canadian Trucking Alliance (CTA) is taking a proactive approach to maintaining this situation.  The CTA is responding positively to the requirements of food industry shippers that have implemented food safety systems into their operations, and use the services of “for-hire” trucking.

The approach taken by CTA was to develop a “core program”, the food safety building blocks relevant to all trucking operations, as well as a series of commodity specific modules which could be introduced depending on the requirements of individual carriers.  The core program consists of food safety prerequisites, the development of standard operating procedures and detailed commodity specific modules.

This style of program allows each carrier to customize their individual program, based on the commodities they presently transport plus allowing the flexibility to add future modules should they expand their business into other areas.

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HACCP

Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points, commonly known as HACCP (pronounced HASSIP), is the food safety self-auditing system at the core of the Trucking Food Safety Program.  HACCP is a system that is preventive, not reactive, that is identifying potential hazards associated with food that are most likely to cause illness and controlling or preventing those hazards.  It combines up-to-date technical and scientific information with step-by-step procedures to evaluate and monitor the safety of food products.

HACCP involves seven (7) principles that:

1. Identify potential hazards and establishes measures to control those hazards.

2. Identifies critical control points (CCPs). These are points in the food’s production from its raw state through processing and shipping to consumption by the consumer, at which the identified hazards can be controlled or eliminated.

3. Establishes preventive measures with critical limits for each critical control point.

4. Establishes procedures to monitor the critical control points.  These procedures include determining what should be monitored, how and when it will be monitored and by whom. 

5. Establishes corrective actions (CAs) to be taken when monitoring shows that the critical limit has not been met.

6. Establishes procedures to verify that the system is working properly.

7. Establishes effective record keeping to document the HACCP system.

HACCP has been endorsed by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), the National Academy of Sciences, the CODEX Alimentarius Commission (of the World Trade Organization, WTO), and the US National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Food (NACMCF) and is an internationally recognized and recommended approach to ensure food safety.

For more information on HACCP, please visit:

www.cfsan.fda.gov/~lrd/haccp.html

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FSEP

The Food Safety Enhancement Program known as FSEP is the food safety program developed by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA).  It is the Canadian program that is designed to encourage the adoption of Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points (HACCP) principles.

Industry and government have developed production control principles that are scientifically and economically more sound which offers greater assurance of food safety and quality and are less reliant upon end product testing.  These measures are designed to introduce on-line process controls that may react quicker to potentially hazardous situations. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency believes that these principles should be incorporated into current inspection programs to better serve both consumers and industry.

For more information on FSEP, please visit:

www.inspection.gc.ca/english/index/fssae.shtml

QMP

The Quality Management Program (QMP) was developed by the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans to control the production of fish and fishery products at registered seafood plants in Canada .  It was quickly recognized as one of the best quality control programs in the world.  In 1996 the QMP Program was updated to include all the elements of HACCP.

For more information on QMP, please visit:

 www.inspection.gc.ca/english/index/fssae.shtml



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