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Verification: Making Sure Your Food Safety Management System Is Working
rinciple 6, Verification, as defined in the harmonized Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) principles from Codex Alimentarius[1] and the National Advisory Committee for Microbiological Criteria for Foods (NACMCF),[2,3] may be the most complicated HACCP principle. From audits that we have conducted, it is the one principle that many companies do not quite appear to grasp. Significant gaps in food safety management systems (FSMS) tend to be found when one examines how different processors define verification activities even among companies with ?certified? HACCP plans.

The National Food Processors Association (now now Grocery Manufacturers Association) felt that the concepts of verification and validation were complex enough that they developed a two-day workshop with an accompanying text that centered on these topics. ?HACCP: Verification and Validation? was taught being an advanced HACCP workshop for persons who had preferably completed the three-day program that focuses on basic concepts and implementation.
The concept of verification is really a late addition to HACCP. The initial principles didn't include verification activities (Table 1). Verification as a principle first appeared in the seven principles published in 1989 by the NACMCF.

The Role of Verification
In the past 20 years, verification activities have already been expanded, definitions have already been modified and expectations have increased, even though principle 6 reads ?Establish verification procedures.? In the original concept of verification, validation is classified as a subcomponent, making things difficult since, in the areas of the quality and food safety field, experts define validation and verification as separate activities.

The essential role of verification would be to ensure that the FSMS or HACCP plan is functioning as designed and works well. Gombas and Stevenson[5] state that ?Verification would be to the HACCP plan what monitoring would be to the critical control point (CCP).? Thus, CCPs look at individual points in the machine and verification looks at the entire food safety system, like the HACCP plan, prerequisite programs (PRPs) along with other system components.

PRPs are defined as the foundation for HACCP in the harmonized Codex Food Hygiene document, the NACMCF document and ISO 22000.[6] PRPs could be when compared to old Sunday school parable that talks of the wise man who built his house upon the rock and the foolish man who built his house upon the sand. The ?house??in this case, the meals safety program?with the strong foundation is more likely to do its job, protecting public health. Additionally, there must be a program to verify that the PRPs are effective.

In 2008, the Codex Alimentarius Commission adopted a new position pertaining to validation and verification.[7] Codex recognized that validation and verification were separate activities in developing food safety control measures. Codex now uses the Food verification following definitions for validation, monitoring and verification:

? Validation is ?obtaining evidence that a control measure or combination of control measures, if properly implemented, is capable of controlling the hazard to a specified outcome.?

? Monitoring is ?the act of conducting a well planned sequence of observations or measurements of control parameters to assess whether a control measure is under control.?

? Verification is ?the application of methods, procedures, tests and other evaluations, besides monitoring, to determine whether a control measure is or has been operating as intended

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