Read the CASE STUDY and answer:

• Outline what did Maria do wrong in developing a HACCP plan and what she should have done differently.
• Provide some suggestions if you were working with Maria to improve her HACCP plan.

CASE STUDY - HACCP Maria, an owner/operator of a local family restaurant, realized that she needed to do more to keep her place safe. That meant taking charge of food safety in a more formal way than before. It was time to develop a food safety management system. Though she had not had any formal training in HACCP, she wanted to develop an HACCP plan for her operation. Maria began by reviewing her menu to try and identify CCPs for each menu item. Most dishes on the menu were grilled items that were prepared, cooked, and then served. Maria determined that risks to these items could best be controlled through cooking, so she identified cooking as the CCP. Next, she identified critical limits for each CCP. For grilled hamburgers, she determined that cooking them to 150F (66C) for 15 seconds would reduce pathogens to a safe level. For grilled chicken, she knew it was necessary to cook it to 165F (74C) for 15 seconds. Maria decided to monitor the critical limits by having cooks press on the meat with their fingertips to check for doneness. As an additional safeguard, she required cooks to cut open product to check the color for doneness. Maria knew she needed to identify a corrective action for products that had not been cooked enough. She decided that if the meat did not feel right or if the color inside was not correct; cooks needed to keep cooking the meat. Maria knew that record keeping was often part of an HACCP program, but she was not sure what types of records to keep. She ended up deciding that for her operation, they really were not necessary.