HACCP certificate: what the law asks, and what your employer asks

A head chef recently sent us a photo of a certificate from a previous job, asking whether it was ‘official’ enough for the new one. The answer is less convenient than people hope. In the Netherlands there is no state HACCP diploma like a driving licence. There is a duty to work in a food-safe way, and a duty to instruct staff.

Two things that get mixed up

The first is the business’s system. Every company that prepares, processes, transports or sells food must control hazards according to the HACCP principles. The NVWA checks that on site: temperatures, cleaning, receiving, and whether people can explain what they do when something is off.

The second is the employee’s paperwork. Regulation (EC) No 852/2004 says that people who handle food must be supervised and instructed or trained in food hygiene. How you prove that is not prescribed down to the pixel. A certificate in the employee’s name is the form that employers, staffing agencies and insurers have come to expect, because a spoken ‘I did explain it once’ sounds thin during an inspection.

What a useful certificate shows

A PDF with just a logo says little. Useful is a document with the person’s name, the date, and a number someone else can look up. With us that number also appears on a verification page, and a copy stays in the employer’s dashboard. A new manager does not have to dig through last season’s WhatsApp chat.

The certificate appears after the exam, not after the practice questions. Twenty questions, thirty minutes, pass from eighty percent. If you fail, the place goes back to the employer, who can let the same person start again without buying a second package for that one attempt.

Validity

There is no legal expiry date on the personal certificate. That does not mean a certificate from 2014 carries the same weight with every inspector. The hygiene code gets updated, teams change, and knowledge fades if all you do is scoop fries. Employers we speak to often have people redo it when a new code comes out, or simply after a few years. That is company policy, not an article of law.

What HACCP means and whether a sports club canteen has to take part are covered in separate articles. The NVWA itself writes about hygiene on nvwa.nl (in Dutch).