2.2 The rules and who sets them

Food handler certification

The operator of a food service business must hold a recognized food handler certificate. When the operator is away, at least one worker on site must hold one.

The rule asks for only one certified person per shift. Even so, many employers expect every food handler to hold the certificate, and the industry treats it as good practice.

The first-level food handler course can be taken in a classroom, online, or by correspondence. To pass, you complete a course with an approved trainer and then sit an exam of 50 multiple-choice questions, needing at least 70%. Successful candidates are entered in a public health database and receive a certificate.

A new first-level certificate lasts five years. To renew it, you take a refresher course and score 80% on its exam. Supervisors can take a second-level course, which covers how to manage food safety and food safety systems.

HACCP: a system used worldwide

HACCP aims to prevent problems, not just to catch them at the end. It looks for biological, chemical and physical hazards at every stage of production, rather than only testing the finished food. The Codex Alimentarius Commission, the United Nations body that sets international food safety standards, recommends it. Most countries use it, and it has been in use since the 1960s.

The seven principles

Every country that uses HACCP follows the same seven principles. Each one below has the cooking step as its example.

• Hazard analysis. List every hazard that could make the food unsafe, and how each could be controlled. At the cooking step, one hazard is that germs survive because the food was not cooked long enough or hot enough.
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• Find the critical control points. A critical control point is a step where action can prevent, remove or reduce a hazard to a safe level. Cooking is one, because something must be done there to kill germs.
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• Set critical limits. A critical limit is the line between safe and unsafe at a control point. For cooking, it is a set time and temperature.
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• Monitor. Check closely and often that each control point stays within its limit. For cooking, that may mean taking the food's internal temperature with a probe thermometer.
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• Corrective action. Decide in advance what to do when a check fails. If food has not reached its temperature, cook it longer. If it cannot reach that temperature, hold it back and destroy it. Fixing the problem during production works far better than testing at the end.
• Verify. Use tests, samples and other checks, on top of monitoring, to confirm the system works as written. Testing and calibrating thermometers is one example: set the probe in boiling water; a correct thermometer shows 100°C (212°F), and one that shows anything else must be adjusted.
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• Keep records. Write down the results of monitoring and verification and what was done about any problem. A cook in charge of a cooking control point might fill in a log with the date, start and finish times, temperature and their signature, and note any problem in a separate deviation log. Official food inspectors check these records.
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