From 1 January 2006 the Regulation 852/2004 of the European Parliament on the Hygiene of Foodstuffs requires that:

Food business operators shall put into place, implement and maintain a permanent procedure based on the principles of hazard analysis critical control points (HACCP).

The transitional period for temperature measuring instruments ends on 1st January 2010.

The basic ideas of HACCP-concept are:

• Make a hazard analysis
• Determine the critical points (CPs) which might be of hazard in the production of the food.
• Determine the CPs which may be CCPs being of high importance to the safety of the food and which may be controlled safely using simple checks named "Controlling".
• For the controlling define the specifications of the product.
• Define a control system of the critical points, using tests which can be carried out during production in order to interfere in case of wrong production. "Monitoring".
• Introduce a documentation in order to record every happening. • Define the corrections to be made in case of critical point being out of control.
• Define the way of verification to confirm that the HACCP-system works."Verification"

The food hygiene guidelines can be summarised in the following points:

• The cooling chain should not be interrupted.
• Deep-freeze temperature: -18 °C (-15 °C).
• Refrigerate as stated in instructions.
• The pasteurization temperature should not be exceeded during cooking (88 - 97 °C).
• Ready-to-eat food which has to be kept heated should not be allowed to go under 65 °C in 3 hours
• When hot food is cooled, the range between +60 °C and +10 °C should be traversed within 3 hours.
• The measured results must be logged.
• The measuring instruments must be suitable and it must be possible to calibrate them.