If you had a Food Safety & HACCP Certificate renewal or a first attempt at the credential scheduled for the coming weeks, you've probably already guessed the in-person portion isn't happening as planned. Travel between states is discouraged in most places right now, and several of our usual testing sites are closed along with everything else that isn't essential. Rather than leave members in limbo until that changes, we're moving as much of the pathway online as the credential responsibly allows, and we want to walk through exactly what that means before the questions start piling up in the member portal.
What moves online, and what doesn't
The coursework already runs largely online, so that part isn't new — the lecture modules on hazard analysis, critical control points, and environmental monitoring were built for remote learning from the start and don't need to change. What's changing is the assessment. Written knowledge checks can now be completed from home on your own schedule, proctored the same way our online coursework has always been verified. The parts of the credential that depend on watching someone work a physical process — reading a make room for contamination risk, walking a recall drill start to finish with a real product and a real clock — are the pieces we can't responsibly certify over a video call. Those stay paused until we can do them properly, either in person again or through a format we trust as much as the current one. We'd rather hold a line here than hand out a credential that doesn't mean what it's supposed to mean.
Practically, that means members partway through the pathway can finish the knowledge components now and hold the hands-on assessment for later without losing progress or having to restart from the beginning. If your two-year recertification window falls in the next few months, we're extending it rather than letting a closed testing site put a paid-up credential at risk through no fault of yours. You don't need to do anything to request that — it's being applied automatically to anyone with a recertification date between now and early summer, and you'll see the updated date reflected in your member record within the next week.
Why the credential is built the way it is
The Food Safety & HACCP Certificate carries the shortest validity period in our credential ladder — two years, against four or five for most of the others — because the underlying practice moves quickly and we'd rather members refresh their thinking on a regular cycle than let it go stale. That design is exactly why we're comfortable stretching the calendar a little right now: a few extra weeks before recertification doesn't undermine the credential the way it might for something that only needed a one-time sign-off years ago. The two-year cycle was built with some slack in mind, even if none of us pictured the slack getting used this way.
If you're newly starting the pathway, this is also a reasonable week to begin rather than wait out. The hazard-analysis and recall-readiness modules apply just as directly to a kitchen running at reduced staff and unfamiliar procedures as they do to a normal week, and a few members have told us that working through the material right now made their current, improvised routines noticeably more solid — a written plan tends to catch gaps that improvising on the fly doesn't. The takeout and delivery safety guidance several national foodservice training programs have been sharing free of charge this month covers similar ground on the retail side, if you're looking for something to pair it with.
Questions about where you stand in the pathway, or whether your recertification date qualifies for the extension, go to the Food Safety Committee through the member portal — they're the fastest route to a real answer this week, and they've been fielding a steady stream of exactly these questions since Monday.
The International Cheese Federation (ICF) and More Cheese are entirely fictional. This post is demonstration content created for MemberJunction. All people, organizations, events, courses, certifications, figures, and quotations in it are invented, and nothing here represents a real association, a real business, a real person, or real professional advice.