HACCP Principle 2: How to Identify Critical Control Points

A control point becomes critical when it is the last opportunity to prevent, eliminate, or reduce a significant hazard to an acceptable level. The word "critical" is doing heavy lifting here. Consider cooking chicken: this is the final step where Salmonella and Campylobacter can be eliminated. If cooking fails, no subsequent step (holding, plating, service) will remove those pathogens. That makes cooking a CCP. Contrast this with vegetable washing: while it reduces bacterial load and removes soil, it is not the last line of defence if those vegetables will subsequently be cooked. In that case, vegetable washing is a control point but not a critical one. However, if you serve raw salad leaves, washing becomes far more significant because there is no subsequent kill step. Context matters enormously when determining CCPs, and this is why you cannot simply copy another business's HACCP plan.

In a typical restaurant or hotel kitchen, the most common CCPs are: cooking (ensuring core temperatures reach at least 75°C, or 70°C for 2 minutes), chilling/cooling (bringing cooked food from 63°C to below 8°C within 90 minutes, then to below 5°C within a further 4 hours), cold holding (maintaining chilled food below 8°C, or below 5°C as best practice), hot holding (maintaining food above 63°C), and receiving deliveries (checking that chilled goods arrive at or below 8°C and frozen goods are at or below -18°C). Some operations will have additional CCPs depending on their menu. Sous vide cooking requires precise time-temperature combinations validated against pathogen reduction tables. Smoking and curing introduce hazards around Clostridium botulinum that require specific controls. Allergen management at the point of order-taking and plating may be treated as a CCP in businesses serving customers with severe allergies, though many manage this through prerequisite programmes instead.