More than one member has said some version of the same thing to us this month: nobody has come to inspect their plant since winter, so is now really the time to spend money on a food-safety credential? We understand the instinct, and we want to push back on it directly.
Routine on-site facility inspections have been paused across most of the country since the spring, as the agencies that normally conduct them redirected staff and avoided sending inspectors into food plants during a respiratory pandemic. For some of our members that has meant the longest gap between inspections in years. It has not meant the underlying food-safety requirements went anywhere. The rules governing a hazard analysis, a critical-control-point plan, and a documented monitoring routine are the same rules they were in January — the only thing that changed is who's checking, and how often.
Why this is the wrong year to get casual
We'd make this argument in any year, but this one has a specific reason to take it seriously: many of our members shifted production this spring, added new products, changed suppliers, or brought on staff who weren't trained under the old routine. A food-safety plan written for last year's operation doesn't automatically cover this year's operation, inspection or no inspection. If your make schedule, your ingredient sourcing, or your packaging changed since February and your HACCP plan didn't change with it, that's a gap regardless of whether anyone from outside your walls has noticed yet.
There's also a longer-term reason. When routine inspections resume at normal pace, whenever that turns out to be, facilities that let documentation slip during the gap will be catching up all at once, often under more scrutiny rather than less. Members who kept their monitoring logs current and their plan updated through this stretch will be in a much better position than members trying to reconstruct six months of recordkeeping from memory.
What the credential actually verifies
Our Food Safety & HACCP Certificate isn't a substitute for inspection and doesn't claim to be. What it verifies is that the person holding it can build and maintain a hazard analysis appropriate to their own operation, identify where their actual critical control points are — not a generic list borrowed from a textbook — and keep the monitoring records that would hold up if someone did walk through the door tomorrow. We've moved the coursework fully online this year, with instructors reviewing submitted plans individually rather than in a classroom setting, which several members have told us actually suits a working cheesemaker's schedule better than the old in-person format did.
If it's been a while since your food-safety plan was reviewed against what you're actually making and how, that review is worth doing regardless of your credential status. If you want structure and a deadline to make sure it happens, the Food Safety Committee can point you to the next HACCP cohort. The inspector not showing up this year isn't a pass. It's a longer runway to get it right before someone checks.
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.