What is HACCP (Food Safety)?

Think of HACCP as a map of every place something can go wrong in your bakery. You're not guessing anymore. You identify the critical control points — the moments where temperature, time, or handling actually matters — and you monitor them. For a chocolate layer cake with buttercream filling, your critical control points might be: (1) storing eggs at 40°F or below, (2) cooling the baked cake to 70°F before frosting, (3) holding the finished cake at 70°F or below if it sits more than 2 hours before delivery. Each point has a specific limit you check and document. The reason bakers care about HACCP is not compliance — it's profit. A batch of 12 cupcakes at $4.50 each is $54 in revenue. If you discover mold in the buttercream on day 3 because you stored it at 72°F instead of 40°F, you lose $54 plus the cost of ingredients (roughly $8 in butter, cream cheese, sugar). One batch. But scale that to a multi-location bakery making 500 cupcakes a week across 8 recipes, and a single temperature failure could cost you $500 in destroyed product plus the liability of a customer getting sick. HACCP forces you to write down what you're already doing — or should be doing. For sourdough starters kept at room temperature, your critical control point is: maintain 68–75°F and discard starter if it smells like acetone or shows pink mold. For bread dough proofing, your critical control point is: bulk fermentation between 75–78°F for 4–6 hours; if room temperature drops to 65°F overnight, fermentation stalls and you risk under-proofed loaves that don't rise in the oven. You measure, you document, you adjust. The system works because it's predictable. You're not relying on memory or hope. You check your walk-in cooler temperature every morning at 6 AM before you start baking. You log it. If it's 42°F instead of 38°F, you know immediately — before you use ingredients that have been warming. You adjust the thermostat, log the time, and move on. A $12 thermometer and a 30-second log sheet prevent a $2,000 loss.