What Is a bakery checklist?
A bakery checklist is how you as an employer make sure your employees are not exposed to hazards, and that they are in a safe working environment.
Table of contents:
1. How do you write a bakery checklist?
2. How do you assess manual handling risks?
2.2. Assess any resulting risks
2.3. Control risks by implementing an HACCP plan
4. Why use a digital solution for your bakery checklist?
How do you write a bakery checklist?
First and foremost, you must perform a risk management process that consists of three steps, which are:
- Hazard identification
- Risk assessment
- Risk control
After identifying the hazards present in your bakery, perform a risk assessment. The third and final step in the risk management process is implementing control measures to minimize the risks of accidents. But it is highly recommended that you also monitor and review the control measures to make sure they are working.
After finishing this risk management process, check for risks linked to manual handling. Injuries related to manual handling are responsible for more than half of the total time lost due to injury in the baking industry. Most of these injuries happen as a result of lifting, handling, or reaching.
The International Labor Organization, in their International Hazard Datasheets on Occupation, lists the following dangers that you should be aware of in your bakery checklist:
- Bakers may suffer from allergies (mainly respiratory and skin allergies) caused by substances used in their work.
- Bakers work with hot equipment and sharp tools, which may cause burns, cuts, and other injuries
- Bakers often handle heavy loads (e.g., flour bags), which could cause back pain and stress
- Bakers work in the heat and, sometimes, at night or other irregular hours. This may cause fatigue, overexertion, and other harmful effects.
Having a bakery checklist can help you:
- Create and maintain a safe workplace
- Prevent illness, injury, illness, pain and suffering of your employees
- Improve efficiency and productivity of employees and overall business performance
- Lower premiums because of fewer workers’ compensation claims
- Faster and easier return to work for employees who get hurt or experience injury
- Less disruption of work and fewer absences
- Reduce employee turnover
How do you assess manual handling risks?
The Commission for Occupational Safety and Health’s Code for Manual Tasks, identifies three steps you can take when identifying manual handling risks:
1. Evaluate your team’s:
- Actions and postures
- Workload
- Work environment and layout
- Work organization
- Skills and experience
2. Assess any resulting risks
Once you’ve found hazards in your bakery, develop a Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) plan to mitigate those hazards. HACCP plans define the strategies needed to ensure proper control of biological, chemical, and physical hazards.
Bakeries require specific HACCP plans for each product. For example, the HACCP plan for a wheat loaf is different from the HACCP plan for cinnamon rolls. There are also specific plans for the different processes involved, such as sanitation and production lines.
3. Control risks by implementing a HACCP plan
When implementing an HACCP plan in your bakery, follow the seven principles of HACCP for manufacturing baked goods:
- Conduct a risk analysis
- Determine the Critical Control Points (CCPs)
- Establish critical limit(s)
- Establish a system to monitor CCPs
- Establish the corrective action to be taken when controls fall
- Establish procedures to verify your HACCP system
- Establish documentation of all applicable procedures and records
The first step in creating your HACCP plan is to form an HAACP team. This team could consist of a quality manager, production manager, maintenance manager, and technical consultant. The quality manager serves as the HACCP team leader.
Next, provide all necessary information about your product’s formulation, composition, and technologies. Formulation refers to allergenic and plant or animal-derived ingredients. Composition refers to elements that affect microbial growth, such as preservatives, acidity, and nutrition labeling. Technologies can be freezing, vacuuming, pasteurization, fermentation, and other manufacturing processes.
It is also important to define your target customers and product use cases. Different customer groups who will buy, prepare, and/or consume your products have different concerns. Such groups include children, lactose-intolerant individuals, and hospital patients.
HACCP plans aren’t complete without a Process Flow Diagram (PFD). This diagram illustrates the process, its components, and its sequence, and should include:
- All ingredients and their role in processing products
- All steps in the manufacturingprocess
- Packaging materials and their specifications
- Processing, handling, and holding conditions, such as time, temperature, viscosity, and additives
- Product flow patterns or movement within and between production areas
- The hygiene maintenance of any bakery equipment
Consult the OSHA standard 29 CFR 1910.263 for regulations related to bakery equipment.
After doing all of the above, create a hazard analysis chart so you can identify whether a hazard is significant or not. This will make your HACCP plan easier, simpler, and more practical.
What are control measures?
Before implementing HACCP, it’s legally required to implement prerequisites, such as food hygiene training for all your employees. These prerequisites teach your employees about the basics of food safety, such as safe cooking and storage temperatures, good personal hygiene practices, preventing cross-contamination, proper waste disposal, effective cleaning, and pest prevention.
If you don’t know the essentials of food safety, your HACCP plan will not be effective. Understanding these is critical to designing corrective action procedures and keeping your customers safe.
Why use a digital solution for your bakery checklist?
Using a digital solution to create bakery checklists simplifies communication and information sharing. With the Lumiform mobile app and desktop software for audits and inspections, you can assign tasks easily and monitor everyone’s work.
Keep track of fully paperless bakery inspections, and together with your team, benefit from:
- Lumiform’s template library of over 12,000 ready made checklists
- A flexibleform builder you can use to create or customize your own bakery checklists.
- Optimized organization than to the app, allowing you to assign, prioritize, and monitor tasks with a few taps.
- Automatically generated reports that help you understand the data you gather.
- Secure cloud storage for all your completed checklists.
