HACCP IN DIARY INDUSTRY

             In India, the dairy industries play an important role in the country’s socioeconomic development, and constitute an important segment of the rural economy. Dairy industry provides livelihood to millions of homes in villages, ensuring supply of quality milk and milk products to people in both urban and rural areas. With a view to keeping pace with the country’s increasing demand for milk and milk products, the industry has been growing rapidly day by day.

The huge volume of milk produced in India is consumed almost entirely by the Indian population itself, in a 50-50 division between urban and nonurban areas. Increasingly, important consumers of the dairy industry are fast-food chains and food and non-food industries using dairy ingredients in a wide range of products.

Most dairy products have an excellent safety record, due to well-controlled processing conditions. The main potential hazards are microbiological. Pasteurization, however, has proved to be successful as a CCP to control classical zoonoses as well as newer foodborne pathogens. Chemical hazards are less important and have in most cases been taken care of by the suppliers of raw materials. Physical hazards are related mainly to packaging. The dairy industry uses a variety of technologies (e.g. heating, drying, chilling, freezing, curing, fermenting), but the HACCP concept can be successfully applied in all types of production lines.

Most steps and procedures required for a HACCP program are likely already being monitored in dairy plants. Many dairy plants need only to reorganize their record keeping system to facilitate full implementation of the HACCP program. As such the actual cost of implementation of a HACCP program is usually quite small.

The following seven (7) principles outline the basics of a HACCP program. These principles, properly applied to a dairy plant, will result in minimizing the potential of a food borne disease outbreak:

1. Assess the hazards in a dairy plant.

 2. Determine critical control points (CCPs).

3. Establish critical limits for each CCP.

4. Implement procedures to monitor CCPs and record data.

5. Institute corrective action.

6. Establish record keeping systems to document the HACCP plan.

7. Verify that the HACCP program is working.

 It may appear that the seven principles of the HACCP program, when applied to an entire dairy plant, will be complicated and difficult to organize. However, when the dairy plant is broken down into sections or processes, the number of CCPs becomes quite manageable.

The dairy hazard analysis is a process of collecting and evaluating information on hazards associated with dairy products, to determine which hazards are reasonably likely to occur and must be addressed in a HACCP Plan. Under the dairy HACCP alternative, you are required to produce, for each type of Grade A dairy product you process, a written hazard analysis to determine whether there are food hazards that are reasonably likely to occur and to identify measures that you can apply to control those hazards. The dairy alternative requires a written hazard analysis for each type of dairy product unless different types of dairy products have identical hazards and control measures that can be combined into one hazard analysis.

Food safety techniques must be developed by an appropriately trained individual (or individuals) based on the Core Curriculum or comparable experience, as specified in the HACCP  manual of each country. This person may be your employee or a hired outside expert.

 

The HACCP applied along the milk marketing chain should identify CCPs all along the chain. The introduction and transmission of zoonoses such as brucellosis and tuberculosis need to be controlled at herd level. Proper hygiene during milking, proper cleaning of utensils and the use of metal cans for storage and transport can reduce contamination and thus the risk of zoonoses such as VTEC. Proper handling, cooling and pasteurization, especially of bulk milk along the chain can further control the risk of zoonoses. None of these controls, except pasteurization, will eliminate 100% of the risk, but the effect of multiple CCPs in series can reduce risk to an acceptable level. Even if pasteurization is already practiced somewhere along the chain, the other CCPs are still important as the system might break down. A CCP should be feasible to apply and appropriate to the production system. It might not be feasible, for instance, for a traditional herd to stop communal grazing, or adopt zero-grazing as part of a CCP.

In order for HACCP to work, education is needed at all levels. Livestock keepers need to be educated about the risk of zoonosis in general. If information on a particular zoonosis is not available, then they should at least be informed of the risk involved in certain activities and husbandry and management practices. Workers along the marketing chain must be educated, not only to reduce their own risk, but also to reduce the risk to consumers. At the end of the chain consumers need to be educated on the risks involved in eating animal products that might not be safe for consumption. Involvement at all levels -- livestock keepers, people along the marketing chain and consumers -- is important to reduce the risk of zoonosis. HACCP training should be given to members in each area of the dairy industry. This requires decentralization of the control capacity and information to be available along the marketing chain, but this might be easier to achieve in formal as compared to informal marketing systems.

  The HACCP concept is the best choice if a quality control programme should be designed for dairy farms. Particularly because it is highly farm-specific, easy to link up with operational management, low in cost, both product and process oriented, and not requiring much labor.