Corrective action

A corrective action is what you do when a check misses its limit, decided before it happens. A hot sauce reads pH 4.00 at the end of the simmer against a ceiling of 3.8: the corrective action is the vinegar that brings it back, how much of it, how many tries, and what becomes of the batch if it still misses.

Why it matters

HACCP’s fifth principle asks for a corrective action for each critical control point, written down in advance, and for a record of every time one was used: what went off target, what was done, and what became of the product.

Other texts ask for the same thing in their own terms. The US regulation on acidified foods, 21 CFR 114.89, says a batch above pH 4.6 is either reprocessed by an established process or set aside for evaluation, and both are logged. For cosmetics, ISO 22716 asks for reprocessing to follow an approved method. Naming the text is as far as this page goes: what an auditor accepts is between you and the auditor.

A worked example

The demo’s hot sauce read pH 4.00 at the end of the simmer. Its recipe says what to do: if pH is above 3.8, add 1 ml of apple cider vinegar per kg for each 0.1 above 3.6, stir 5 minutes, and check again, up to 3 times. With 8.4 kg in the pot, the first pass was 34 ml. The pH then read 3.86, the second pass was 22 ml, and the pH read 3.74. Each pass names the vinegar lot it was poured from, so a recall from that lot finds the batch.

Where each part lives in BatchDash

• Decided in advance: the condition in the recipe’s method. See conditional steps.
• What was done: each pass and each addition on the batch, kept under Conditions and corrective actions on its batch record. See additions and corrective actions.
• What became of the product: the decision (Release as is, Hold, Discard or Keep going) and the release, each with who and why. See holding and releasing a batch.
• The log across batches: Reports › Corrective actions, filtered to critical control points when you need only those, with an Export.

What stays yours

The plan: which steps are critical, their limits, and which corrective actions are approved. BatchDash works out the amounts and records what was done. When a limit is reached, the decision waits for someone allowed to make it.

The pitch version is on the formulas page.