Purpose: When Cyprus joined the European Union in 2004, all food businesses had to comply with EU legislation. Many SME’s in Cyprus had no food safety management systems in place at this time so a longitudinal study was set up to assess the impact of these systems on the hygiene of the businesses. The study also identified barriers to implementation in the study group.
Methods: An investigation was carried out from October 2005 to April 2008 using a sample of 50 SMEs located in the island of Cyprus. The study assessed the implementation of HACCP, CYS 244 and ISO22000 by measuring specific hygiene indicators. These were assessed at five critical points in the process and included microbiological standards, environmental contamination, hygiene practises, knowledge and attitude, and cost of implementation.
Results: The results show that initial implementation of Pre-Requisite Programmes and a simplified HACCP plan resulted in a significant improvement (P < 0.05) in all the parameters measured. However, most particpants encountered problems in applying and maintaining the systems and each enterprise had its own application limit regarding the complexity of the system. When this limit was exceeded, negative results appeared for the enterprise, indicating deterioration in hygiene. For some parameters, e.g., microbiological standards, the final measurements, after implementation of the most complex system, indicate more failures (10.6% of samples) than the baseline measurements taken before implementation of any system (8.4%).
Significance: The results suggest that while aspects of food safety management such as PRP’s can help improve premises hygiene, attempting to implement a food safety management system that is too complex for an SME can result in the deterioration of food hygiene in the premises according to certain food safety indicators.