Creating A Preharvest Food Safety Checklist

By Phil Tocco,

Produce growers looking to streamline food safety can face a daunting challenge. Often, multiple controls need to be monitored and recorded at the same time. When getting ready for harvest, the grower may need to make sure potable water is available to all workers while ensuring the harvest containers are clean and a myriad other tasks. It is easy to forget to monitor a step or write down that the step was accomplished on a log sheet for that specific control point. One strategic approach recommended by Michigan State University Extension that can help streamline the process is by organizing the various controls around a task instead of around a particular control point.

A grower who is getting ready to harvest fresh produce could have a preharvest checklist that lists all the main process controls for that harvest. The grower signs and dates the checklist once, then checks off each process control step as it is accomplished. Checklists can be created for hydrocooling, grading or any other step where multiple process controls need to be monitored prior to commencing the activity. This eliminates the need for signing multiple log sheets for each activity, but it requires one checklist sheet per activity performed.