Food Processing Editing and Proofreading Services

A cook temperature drifts. The chart recorder shows 71 °C where it should show 75, for eleven minutes, on a Sunday night shift. What happens next — whether that product is held, released, reworked or shipped — depends on whether somebody wrote down, in advance, the exact number, the exact action and the exact person. Food safety is a documentation discipline wearing a hairnet.

We edit what food manufacturers and processors produce — HACCP plans and critical limit documentation, corrective action procedures for deviations, prerequisite programme documentation, monitoring records and their formats, validation and verification documentation, allergen management and cleaning validation documentation, specification and shelf life documentation, traceability and recall procedures, customer and retailer audit responses, supplier approval documentation, and label and claim documentation. Our editors work on the limit and the action attached to it.

The critical limit and its corrective action is the working core of a food safety plan, and its failure is a limit without a decision. A plan stating that the cook must reach 75 °C has established a target; the plan has to say what happens at 74. We work through these so every critical limit is a single number with its measurement point, its instrument and its frequency, since a limit measured at the wrong point in the product is not a limit; so the deviation action is written as a sequence somebody performs at two in the morning — what to do with the product, how far back and forward to isolate, who to call, what to record and who releases it — because the person finding the deviation is usually the most junior person on site; so the isolation boundary is defined as a rule rather than a judgement, given that "affected product" is decided differently by every shift; so the authority to release is named with the evidence required, and the absence of that person has a stated route; so validation is separated from monitoring, as the evidence that 75 °C is sufficient is a different document from the record that it was achieved; so any limit that has been set tighter than the validated one is identified, since operators need to know which number is safety and which is margin; and so the record format makes a deviation visible rather than a tick. Plans written this way survive both an audit and a Sunday night.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including plans, records and customer specifications. We are editors rather than food safety practitioners, and we offer no view on hazards, limits or corrective actions. What we can do is attach a decision to every number.