Food safety logs and restaurant costs

HACCP Plans and Critical Control Points

A HACCP plan is a written food safety plan built around the steps where a hazard can be controlled. These pages help you structure one: a plan builder for a restaurant, a blank template, worked examples, a planner for the seven principles, the critical control point decision tree and a look at which rules require a plan. Limits come from the FDA Food Code and USDA guidance named on each page. Your health department decides what your operation needs, so confirm with them.

Tools in this group

  • Critical Control Points: CCP Decision Tree — Enter a process step and its hazard, answer the four decision tree questions, and see whether the step is a critical control point or not, with the examples that FDA Food Code Annex 4 gives.
  • HACCP Plan Example — Pick a sample menu item to see a complete HACCP plan with flow steps, hazard analysis, CCP limits from the FDA Food Code and a plain-words summary. Each one is an example to edit for your own menu.
  • HACCP Plan for a Restaurant — Pick how a menu item is prepared and what is cooked. You get the flow chart steps, a hazard analysis worksheet and a critical control point summary with Food Code limits, ready to edit, print or download.
  • HACCP Plan Template — Choose how many flow steps, hazard rows and CCP rows you need and which columns to keep. The blank template follows the contents list in Food Code 8-201.14; print it or download it as CSV for Excel or Word.
  • What Is a HACCP Plan? — A HACCP plan is the written document that sets out how a food business controls its food safety hazards. Tick what you have done so far and see the next step among the five preliminary tasks and seven principles.
  • When Is a HACCP Plan Required? — Pick what you do or plan to do, such as vacuum packaging, smoking food or processing seafood. The page shows what the cited rule says, which regulator to ask and what the plan must contain.