HACCP and Why You Need to Know It

Any culinary school student has heard those letters before. Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points, what we call HACCP for short, are the safety guidelines that we must follow in the kitchen. It regulates everything for us including our sanitizer numbers, to how long we have to cool pastry cream or how we stock a fridge. Hint, never store your dairy or meats on top.

When you step foot in a kitchen, sure it's important to know your knife cuts or how to make a mousse, but what is just as important is to know you HACCP. This is true for not only Disney, but any kitchen that you work in.

Part of the reason why the Disney Culinary Program recruits from culinary schools is because they know that we learn these things. Before you even apply, you have to be ServSafe certified. They know they can teach you how to cook, but you should already know your food safety and sanitation.

So, why do I feel this is so important to make a post about? I work as a Campus Rep for the DCP and get to help with proctoring the HACCP tests before you take your interviews. I also get to hear direct feedback from the recruiters on what are people's strengths and weaknesses. And the major weakness is not knowing HACCP.

The tests only have one answer for each question, there's no other answers but the right one. Sure we have seen a lot of good tests get handed in, but we've also seen some pretty scary ones. We've seen tests where people think that milk is held at 0F or that you cook beef to 185F. We've een conversion factor questions left blank and a bunch of other scary answers that you can only imagine.

I know what it's like to get into lab and want to jump right into baking. Who cares about sanitation when there's cakes to be made right? But the sanitation is part of that recipe, it is just as important as picking cake flour rather than hi gluten flour. You may think that your chefs/teachers are saying this stuff just because they have to, but I cannot stress enough how much you need to know this stuff. You will walk into a bakery and need to scale a recipe down, you will need to convert something from pounds to grams, you will need to know your conversions. You will walk into a kitchen and you will need to know to put raw beef on the bottom shelf, you will need to know what temperatures to cook a certain cut of meat and you will most definitely need to know proper sanitation procedures to prevent cross contamination.

I'm a senior in my last trimester of culinary school. I've gone through 20 baking and pastry labs and a full course in ServSafe. I know my HACCP information because I've taken the time to study it. I do the Disney HACCP test just for fun to see if I've still got it and I do. Yet a fellow senior baking and pastry person had to ask me this past week how to scale down a recipe and how many pounds are in a quart. You almost have to ask yourself if you are going to the same school.

Disney can mold you into the cook they want you to be, but they expect you to already know your sanitation. We hear directly from the recruiters that one of the things they look for is basic stuff like conversions, temperatures, and sanitation. Not only does Disney look for it, but I guarantee you that every kitchen you will ever work in looks for it too. Working in a kitchen is more than just whipping things up or doing cuts with your french knife, it's having the skills to work in that kitchen and the knowledge of how to work in the kitchen safe and clean.

Start studying!