How safe is imported food?
Do you check where especially meat products are from before purchasing?
To ensure high standards of production of beef, pork and their products, the European Union (EU) community countries have developed multiple integrated systems which are designed to ensure high standard of hygiene throughout the production chain, including the safety of produced food. The systems are obligatory for EU meat producers to use.
EU meat producers said in a statement that the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points system (HACCP), Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP), Good Hygiene Practice (GHP) and Good Agricultural Practice (GAP) are examples of food safety systems now in use. In an establishment where the HACCP system is implemented, a special HACCP team is assigned.
As a result of the implementation of the EU hygienic package, the European Union has one of the most restrictive standards of production of pork, beef and their products in the world.
How do they work in practice?
The HACCP system detects and removes the risks at a time and place of their occurrence, not after evaluation of the finished product. In this system all possible biological, chemical and physical hazards are identified on the basis of a detailed analysis of the production process. In the course of analysis, the places, raw materials and technological operations that can involve health threatening factors and which should be particularly supervised are identified. In the community countries all companies in the meat processing sector – also small and medium ones – are required to apply the HACCP system. It is worth stressing that this obligation also applies to companies operating in the logistics of food.
The main advantages of the HACCP system include primarily ensuring the fulfilment of customer expectations as to the guarantee of safe and high-quality EU beef, pork and their products.
Pre-HACCP procedures
In the EU meat sector, the basis for the introduction of a system to ensure the high quality of beef, pork and their products are the Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) and the Good Hygiene Practice (GHP) procedures. They are a set of rules and conditions of hygiene the compliance to which is a prerequisite for obtaining a meat product of the appropriate health quality and level of safety for the consumer.
Measures to ensure the safety of EU beef and pork are taken already at the stage of farming. The personnel employed on farms, identification and origin of animals, environmental protection, buildings, veterinary care and feeding of animals for slaughter are components of the Good Agricultural Practice (GAP). Since GMP, GHP and GAP precede the implementation of the HACCP system, they are called pre-HACCP procedures.
“Mandatory implementation of the HACCP system in EU establishments producing beef, pork and their products favours both the improvement of the production process by the appropriate information and documentation flow, the increase of awareness of employees and the early detection of discrepancies, as well as the increase of effectiveness of the measures to ensure the safety and quality of produced food.
“The tasks carried out by numerous EU systems of control and food safety are to ensure that the food which does not meet the requirements is not made available in the market,” the EU meat producers’ statment concluded.
