How to get a HACCP plan for a bakery

1. MyHACCP, the free FSA tool

Free · A few hours, more if you are new to it

What is good about it. It is free, it comes from the Food Standards Agency, it is built for UK manufacturers with fifty staff or fewer, and it produces a PDF of your study plus monitoring record templates. There is no better place to start if you have the knowledge and the time.

The catch. It gives you the framework and asks you to fill it. You supply the hazards, the control measures and the critical limits yourself, at every step. That is the part that needs the expertise, and it is the part an auditor will question hardest. It is also generic across all food manufacturing, so nothing in it is specific to baking.

MyHACCP

2. A downloadable template pack

Roughly £30 to £200, paid once · An evening of editing, longer to do it properly

What is good about it. Cheap, immediate, and the bakery-specific packs are written by people who know baking. You keep the files and can edit them in Word.

The catch. A template is somebody else's plan with your name on it. The work is in deciding which parts apply to you and deleting the rest, and that is exactly the judgement the pack cannot make. Half-edited templates are one of the most common findings at audit, because the auditor can tell.

3. A food safety consultant

From about £500, and £800 to £1,200 is typical for a small business · A week or two, including a site visit

What is good about it. It is the only option where a qualified person looks at your actual premises. You get a plan written for your site, and usually somebody to ring when the auditor asks something awkward.

The catch. Cost, and lead time. For a bakery making bread and cakes in one unit, much of what you pay for is a consultant re-deriving hazards that are the same in every bakery in the country.

4. Compliance software on subscription

About £40 a month at the small end, several hundred at the top · Hours to a plan, then ongoing

What is good about it. You get the plan and the day-to-day monitoring in one place, with reminders and an audit trail. If you are going to run your records digitally anyway, the plan comes almost free with it.

The catch. It is a recurring bill for something you may need once. If the plan is the reason you signed up, you are renting a document. Several of these tools also generate the plan conversationally, which means the output varies between runs and cannot be version-controlled in the way an auditor expects.

5. This tool

£49, paid once · About fifteen minutes

What is good about it. The bakery hazards are already written, with the control measure and the reasoning for each, so you are answering questions about your own process rather than doing a hazard analysis from scratch. The same answers always produce the same document, so it can be versioned and defended. It also tells you what you have not got yet.

The catch. It has never seen your premises. It knows only what you tell it, it covers bakery only, and the plan is a draft until a competent person has read it and signed it. If your process is unusual, you will have editing to do.