Topic · Food Safety Plan
5- Establish Corrective Action
Background: Corrective Actions, Verification, and Documentation in your Food Handler Certificate course covers the theory. This lesson shows you how to apply it to your own Food Safety Plan.
Objective: By the end of this lesson, you will be able to write corrective actions for every CCP before something goes wrong. You will be able to:
- Define a corrective action.
- Write actions that fix the product and the cause.
- Record what was done.
What a corrective action is
A corrective action is what you do when monitoring shows a critical limit has not been met. It is written in advance, so nobody has to improvise in the middle of a service.
Every corrective action does three things
- Deals with the food: keep cooking, reheat, re-chill, or throw it out.
- Fixes the cause: repair the fridge, retrain the cook, change the recipe step.
- Records it: what happened, what was done, who did it and when.
Examples
| Deviation | Corrective action |
|---|---|
| Chicken reads 68 °C at the end of cooking | Continue cooking to 74 °C (165 °F) and recheck; check oven temperature |
| Soup in hot holding reads 52 °C | Less than 2 hours: reheat to 74 °C (165 °F). Unknown time: discard. Check the unit |
| Stock still at 30 °C two hours after cooking | Discard, or reheat to 74 °C and restart cooling in shallow pans or an ice bath |
| Walk-in reads 8 °C | Move high-risk food to another fridge, assess time out of temperature, call for repair |
When in doubt, throw it out. The cost of a batch of soup is small next to the cost of an outbreak.