HACCP is Hell

HACCP plans required for special processes, such as reduced oxygen packaging, sous vide cooking, or curing, have become so onerous to develop that I have chosen to permanently step away from HACCP. No more HACCP for Austin.

For those clients who have already engaged me, rest assured: I’ll finish the HACCP plans that I’ve filed and see them through to variance approvals.

But I do find it bizarre how the process that’s accepted in Miami is denied in New York City, how the steps lauded in Los Angeles are rejected in Boston, how Maryland requires HACCP for every production process whereas Nashville invokes the 48 hour rule while Las Vegas takes a year-and-a-half and charges thousands of dollars for improvement suggestions which are immaterial to the safety of product.

I’ve been working nationwide since early 2021, and in the past 5 years, I’ve found inconsistencies across the different municipalities and states that are staggering. Those inconsistencies mean that I’m revising, time & again, plans that are based on empirical food science and that have been approved in other municipalities.

HACCP is based, after all, on food science. HACCP is not some subjective opinion, it is not a set of moving goalposts.

As we know, in 2026, science is out the window in this country. Science is a baby tossed out with the bathwater. It’s children dying from measles and the flu vaccine requirements withdrawn from the military; it’s the idiotic MAHA movement (with no attention to sugar???), a fixation on animal protein consumption, a blind faith in the unseen & unproven and a perverse allegiance to “conscience exemption” and “medical freedom” without any persective on what it means to be part of a community, let alone be a good neighbor.

COVID vaccines are now doubted and I have to beg my doctor for one? Oh, please, is everyone’s attention span so short that no one remembers one million dead Americans between 2020 and 2022?

My wife & I lived in NYC back then, there were refrigerator trucks with bodies piled in them. Medical workers couldn’t keep up with the deaths, space for the dead was scarce. Every night at 7pm, we opened the windows and cheered or screamed into the cold night air to acknowledge the first responders, the nurses & doctors, the infected, and those recently passed away.

As a species, we didn’t evolve through prayer. We got strong through science: iwas penicillin, it was antibiotics, it was antivirals, it was medicine that got us to where we are today. We eradicated polio by 1988. We turned HIV / AIDS from a death sentence into something that’s as treatable as seasonal allergies. The list goes on. And now we have unqualified jackasses undoing all of our scientific progress and a (largely) unengaged population along for the ride. Don’t get me started on Venezuela or Iran ;)

But back to HACCP and food. Food science hasn’t changed.

But HACCP requirements are so all-over-the-map that an effective HACCP or variance filing should really be done by boots-on-the-ground in that city, someone who knows what the reviewer wants to see.

A remote filing, based in science, leads to hours of wasteful revision, to a lot of back-and-forthing with regulators who are deservedly holding tightly to their roles to, perhaps, spare themselves from the federal emphasis on deregulation. More broadly, perhaps to rise to the level of their agency’s original mission.

But it makes for quite a lot of unnecessary work for yours truly.

So, when I calculate what I charge for a HACCP plan versus the time spent, I see that I can make more money working at Burger King. And I’m a vegetarian, but believe me, I’ve entertained working the griddle at BK versus re-crossing t’s and re-dotting i’s on a HACCP plan rejected for having too much, or too little, in it.

Therefore, I will no longer develop HACCP plans.

There are plenty of capable consultants for your HACCP needs, and most of them are on Google.

In my honest opinion, the regulators should write the HACCP plans and the operators should adopt them. HACCP used to be a due diligence exercise to control for hazards in food production; it has become something where the regulator shows how wrong the HACCP is, on paper, without setting foot in the production facility. That, dear friends, is called bureaucracy.

If you have other QA or food safety plan needs, feel free to reach out.

I’m an expert when it comes to permitting.

I’m always happy to work with good people for a flat, fair fee.

This helps your food business achieve its goals of high-quality, consistently safe product.

And, ultimately, isn’t that what we’re all doing all this for? Top quality & consistent safety.

Thanks for reading! Wishing you a beautiful day ahead. Be safe.