Hazard analysis and preventive controls

Hazard analysis is where you work through each step of a product's process and record what could go wrong and how you control it. Crown structures the work, keeps your decisions in one place, and carries them into your PCP document. It lives under Food Safety in the main menu.

Before you start

An approved recipe for the product. Hazard analysis is built around the product's recipe stages plus the standard facility steps (receiving, storage, packaging, shipping, sanitation). A product needs an approved recipe before it appears in the product picker. See Your first recipe.

Working through the steps

Open Food Safety and select a product. Crown lays out its process as a series of steps, each shown as a card with its hazards. You have three ways to handle each step:

• Evaluate hazards: Crown proposes hazards for the step, which you then review.
• Add: author a hazard yourself.
• Mark as controlled: point the whole step at a prerequisite program rather than listing hazards for it individually (for example, a step fully governed by your sanitation program).

Crown QMSAI-proposed hazards, flagged as drafts for review

Recording a hazard

When you add or confirm a hazard, you record:

• Category: biological, chemical, or physical.
• Whether it's reasonably likely, with your justification.
• Severity.
• The preventive control, plus how you monitor it, the corrective action if it fails, and the verification activity.
• The responsible role.

A draft hazard becomes part of your plan when you Confirm it. You can Reject a proposed hazard that doesn't apply, with a reason.

Changing your mind about a rejection

Rejecting a hazard isn't final. Open a rejected hazard and select Reopen to return it to draft, where you can re-evaluate it and confirm or reject it again through the usual route. The original rejection and the reason you gave for it stay in the record even after the hazard comes back, so the account of what you decided and when stays intact. Reopen only applies to a rejected hazard; a confirmed one is already in your plan.

Adding a hazard yourself

Adding a hazard by hand skips the draft stage — it goes straight into your plan as confirmed. Because of that it has to arrive complete, and Crown won't save it otherwise:

• Say a hazard is reasonably likely and you need both a preventive control type and a written description of the control.
• Say it isn't and you need a likelihood justification recording why not at this step.
• Mark it controlled by a prerequisite program and you need to name the program that controls it. Crown then skips severity, likelihood, and preventive-control scoring for that hazard, keeping the category and description so an inspector reading the row can still see what's being controlled and by which program.

If something is missing, the save is refused with a message naming what's outstanding. This is deliberate: a hazard entering the plan as confirmed with no control and no rationale behind it is exactly the row an inspector stops on.

Critical control points

A confirmed hazard can be marked as a CCP with a toggle. Crown records the designation and carries it into the preventive controls section of your PCP.

The matrix view

For a product with hazards across many steps, the Matrix view shows them as a single grid of hazard against process step, so you can see where the same concern recurs and confirm or reject related entries together.

Your supplier control approach

One part of your plan isn't authored on this page. Food Safety → Approach holds the position you take on suppliers as a whole, and it's what fills Section 3 of your preventive control plan.

Three things are recorded there:

• Default supplier qualification tier — the level of qualification you apply unless a particular supplier warrants otherwise.
• Compensating controls implemented — what you rely on instead where full supplier-side qualification isn't feasible: your own ingredient specifications, receiving checks, segregated storage.
• Scope limits accepted — where you're knowingly accepting a limit, and why.

Fill it in before generating your plan. With nothing declared, Section 3 prints a placeholder telling the reader to update it — which is not what you want an inspector reading.

What's next

Confirmed hazards and their controls flow straight into your preventive control plan. See Generating your PCP document, and Setting up a prerequisite program for the programs a step can be controlled by.