Why We Need More Than HACCP

For decades, HACCP has been the foundation of food safety. It’s still essential, but here’s the problem: HACCP on its own doesn’t give today’s food businesses — or their packaging and distribution partners — everything they need to manage risk.

Today, managers are expected to juggle not one, but three different types of risk assessment:

• Health & Safety – protecting employees, contractors, and visitors.

• Environmental & Sustainability – minimising impact on resources, waste, and climate.

• Product Safety – ensuring food, packaging, and distribution are safe and compliant.

Most courses treat HACCP in isolation, but in reality it’s only one piece of this wider picture. At Techni-K, the course that we’re developing will start by showing learners how Product Safety hazard analysis fits into the bigger landscape of risk management. That way, technical and compliance managers can see the connections across disciplines, rather than treating product safety as a tick-box exercise.

But here’s where we’re different: once the bigger picture is clear, the course will zoom in on Product Safety. Because that’s the area where most businesses still struggle to turn theory into practice.

Supply chains are global and complex. Customers demand transparency. Regulators expect evidence. And issues like allergens, food fraud, and packaging safety are just as critical as microbial risks. Traditional HACCP courses often skim the surface, leaving managers with theory but not the practical skills to build and maintain a live, working system.

Our Product Safety Plan approach goes beyond HACCP. It also covers HARPC and HARA, and it applies equally to food, packaging, and storage and distribution operations. Hazards are explored in all their forms — physical, microbial, chemical, allergenic, radiological, sensory, or stress-related — and we will teach how they can be introduced in different ways, whether by accident, poor practice, or even deliberate acts like fraud or tampering. More importantly, we’ll focus on the how: learners will leave with the tools to construct structured hazard statements, define workable controls, and link their plan into product development and change management.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing a series of blogs walking through each stage of the Product Safety Plan — from laying the foundations, to hazard analysis, validation, and keeping the plan alive. Along the way, I’ll also highlight where traditional training falls short, and how we’ve building our course to fill those gaps.

Be the first to hear

If you want to be the first to hear when the training is released, just fill in the details below and we’ll be in touch.