Ahead of the pack

Crowne Plaza Muscat has recently been awarded an HACCP certification giving it the distinction of being amongst a handful of hotels in Oman who can boast of such standards. Mayank Singh reports

Crowne Plaza, Muscat has recently been awarded a Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) certification. HACCP is a systematic preventive approach to food safety and pharmaceutical safety that addresses physical, chemical and biological hazards. Says Herve Corvest, general manager, Crowne Plaza, “HACCP reflects our focus on hygiene, sanitation and we see it not merely as a process for the hotel but for the country as a whole. When we apply and get an HACCP certification we force our suppliers and ministries to apply similar standards in the country.” Realising the benefits, all hotels in Dubai were asked to become HACCP compliant a few years ago.

Says Janet Turner, director of sales and marketing, “We are protecting the interests of the local suppliers as presently HACCP is not mandatory in Oman. The idea is to introduce HACCP to the wider community producing food and to benefit everyone.” The hotel has communicated the HACCP standards to its suppliers and is enforcing them amongst them. Being an international certification HACCP gives a lot of comfort to tourists when they visit a country. Adds Turner, “The more health and safety standards that a hotel follows, the more appealing it is for international travellers, thus HACCP will help attract tourists to Oman.”

The process

The hotel started working on getting a HACCP certification two years ago. This was further broken down into three month modules. Says Gireesh Nair, executive chef, “The idea of HACCP is to have traceability so that everyone is accountable for the products that they are sending out into the market. It is documented and there are seven implementation principles.” Traceability means that if the hotel gets a complain that a stake was not good then it can go back and check when it was processed, from which supplier it came from, and when and where it was imported from. Thus it can be traced back to the farm where it was slaughtered.

As a part of the process, the hotel started to audit suppliers to make sure that they were following the standards at their end. Overall, it required money, equipment and processes. The hotel spent RO150,000 in getting an HACCP. Training of the staff is another issue that had to be looked into as there were people from different cultures speaking various languages. “We did courses in Arabic and in English to familiarise people with the essentials. Once the staff got trained, then we started implementing the standards on the floor. Then the equipment came down and we changed some of our processes,” explains Nair.

Once the staff was comfortable with what they had achieved, Crowne Plaza invited the Norwegian company (SGS) which does an HACCP certification. HACCP was introduced during the moon mission, as the risk of food poisoning had to be ruled out. In a hotel though things are more complicated as there are numerous production lines, and so the chefs have random samples kept over a period of time, which are tested. The hotel has a reporting, pest control, maintenance, temperature control and a reheating system for the food that has been cooked. Says Nair, “The main import of HACCP at the Crowne plaza is to advertise that we serve safe food and we have an internationally recognised system in place.” Adds Corvest, “It is where the food industry is going and we would not like to catch up but be ahead of it.”

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