Food Safety Plans

Developing a food safety plan and having a food safety point person are absolutely vital to successfully passing any food safety certification audit. This is also a way to be sure your efforts toward food safety are carried out.

A food safety plan is a workbook or binder of information that you create for your farm and operation that addresses how you handle food safety risks. For example, it addresses if you are you applying manure, compost or fertilizer at the right times and in appropriate quantities. How you are storing them? What are you doing to keep wildlife out of your fields? How do you manage your employees and ensure that they practice safe handling and hygiene?

Here are some resources and templates to consider using when developing your plan. Remember, though, that every plan is different and must be unique to your farm - there is no cookie-cutter example. The key is to know your plan and to practice it on your farm!

• On-Farm Food Safety Project
  Includes resources and a free online tool which generates customized on-farm food safety plans based on user input, by FamilyFarmed.org
  
• 2010 MSU GAP Manual for Fruit and Vegetables
  GAP Manual developed by MSU Extension and the Michigan Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Association, Inc.
• Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) for Food Safety in Blueberry Manual
  Resource for Blueberry Growers developed by the Trevor Nichols Research Center 
• Grower Self Audit for a USDA GAP Audit, General Questions P1, P2 G-1 to G-15
  University of Maine Extension Resource for Potato Growers
• Food Safety Begins on the Farm: A Grower Self Assessment of Food Safety Risks
  Rangarajan, A., E. Bihn, M. Pritts, and R. Gravani
  
• 2011 Good Agricultural Practices and Good Handling Practices Audit Verification Program User’s Guide 
  United States Department of Agriculture