HACCP and the role of the expiry label

Every professional kitchen lives with invisible hazards: a protein left too long out of refrigeration, a sauce opened more days ago than it should have been, a thawed item with no recorded time. HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points) — known in Portuguese and Spanish as APPCC — exists precisely to make those hazards visible and controllable. And the expiry label is one of the simplest, and most frequently requested, pieces of evidence that this control is actually happening.

This is an operational guide, not legal advice. Check your local sanitary authority for the requirements that apply to you.

What HACCP is, in practical terms

HACCP is a systematic method for identifying hazards (biological, chemical and physical) along the food flow and defining critical control points — the steps where a hazard can be eliminated or reduced to a safe level. At each control point you set a limit, monitor it, record it and correct it when something drifts out of range.

Its core principles include:

• Analyze the hazards at each step of the process.
• Identify the critical control points.
• Set limits for each critical control point.
• Monitor continuously.
• Define corrective actions.
• Record and document everything that was controlled.

That last point is where the label comes in.

The label as a control record

Time and temperature are, in practice, the most frequent critical control point in a kitchen. The expiry label turns that control into a physical record attached to the product itself. A good label answers four questions immediately:

• What — which product and in what state (sealed, opened, prepared, thawed, cooked).
• When — when it was opened or prepared.
• Until when — the already-calculated expiry date and time.
• Who — the person responsible for handling it.

That set is exactly what an auditor looks for: traceability. Without the label, control becomes memory — and memory does not pass an inspection.

Legible and standardized beats handwriting and tape

A label scrawled on masking tape fails in three ways: it smudges, it peels, and it depends on whoever wrote it. When the expiry date is illegible, control stops being verifiable. A printed, standardized, legible label is objective evidence — anyone on the team, or an external auditor, reads the same information without ambiguity.

A quick checklist for a label that serves as a HACCP record:

• Identifies product and state
• Shows handling date/time
• Shows expiry date/time
• Names the responsible person
• Is legible and survives kitchen routine

How EtiquetaChef helps

EtiquetaChef generates this record automatically inside the workflow: you pick the product, set the state, and the app calculates the expiry and prints the label on a Bluetooth thermal printer. The system also separates current labels from history, records the responsible person, and flags what expires today — turning time control into a standardized process, instead of a handwritten note no one can audit later.