Free CP-FS Exam Flashcards

Improper holding temperatures, inadequate cooking, contaminated equipment, food from unsafe sources, and poor personal hygiene. Risk-based inspections score these first, so a risk-factor violation outranks any good-retail-practice finding on the same report.

Food, Acidity, Time, Temperature, Oxygen, Moisture - the six conditions pathogens need to grow. Every control step works by removing or limiting at least one of them, so a written procedure should name which factor it actually controls.

By the interaction of pH and water activity in its Tables A and B, not by a single cutoff. For food that is not heat-treated and packaged (Table B), a water activity below 0.88 or a pH below 4.2 is non-TCS outright, while combinations such as pH above 5.0 with water activity of 0.88 or higher require a documented product assessment. The older pH 4.6 and 0.85 pair is only a rough screen.

Milk, eggs, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soybeans, and sesame. Sesame became the ninth on January 1, 2023 under the FASTER Act, so any allergen training material or bulk-food label written before that date is out of date.

An SOP tells staff how to perform a food-handling task, such as cooling chili or receiving a delivery. An SSOP is specifically a sanitation procedure: what is cleaned, with what, how often, by whom, and how it is verified. Auditors ask for both, and a sanitation step buried inside a general SOP usually fails.

Good manufacturing practices are the federal baseline conditions for processing facilities under 21 CFR 117 Subpart B. Good retail practices are the Food Code items outside the five risk factors, such as equipment condition, physical facilities, and labeling. Retail inspection forms score them in a separate section.

1 Conduct a hazard analysis. 2 Determine critical control points. 3 Establish critical limits. 4 Establish monitoring. 5 Establish corrective actions. 6 Establish verification. 7 Establish record keeping. The order is load-bearing: you cannot set a critical limit for a step you have not first identified as a CCP.

A CCP is the last step where a hazard can be prevented, eliminated, or reduced to an acceptable level, so losing control there means an unsafe product. A prerequisite program such as pest control or sanitation supports the plan but is not a CCP. Labeling every step a CCP dilutes monitoring and is a common plan-review finding.

The operator's own ongoing system for controlling the five risk factors, instead of relying on an inspector to find problems. Evidence includes trained staff, written procedures, self-inspection logs, and documented corrective actions. Inspectors credit AMC when violations are caught and fixed before they are cited.

A corrective action fixes the food or the moment, such as discarding chili found at 120 F. Root cause analysis asks why the steam table failed and prevents recurrence. Violations that repeat across inspections are the signal that only corrective action, never root cause, was performed.

41 F to 135 F. Pathogens grow fastest through this range, so every hot-holding, cold-holding, cooling, and reheating limit in the Food Code exists either to move food through it quickly or to keep food out of it.

165 F instantaneous for poultry, stuffed foods, and stuffing containing meat, fish, or poultry. 155 F for 17 seconds for ground and other non-intact meat, comminuted fish, mechanically tenderized or injected meat, and eggs not cooked to order. 145 F for 15 seconds for intact meat cuts, fish, and eggs cooked to order. 135 F for plant food cooked for hot holding. The 155 F hold was lengthened from 15 to 17 seconds in the 2017 edition.

Cooked TCS food must fall from 135 F to 70 F within 2 hours, then reach 41 F or below within 4 more hours, 6 hours total. Missing the first stage means reheating to 165 F and restarting the cool, or discarding. You cannot borrow unused time from the second stage.

165 F for 15 seconds, reached within 2 hours. Commercially processed ready-to-eat food taken from an intact package needs only 135 F. Steam tables and holding cabinets are designed to hold, not to reheat, so the reheat must happen in cooking equipment first.

Hold TCS food at 135 F or above, or at 41 F or below. Roasts cooked under the Food Code's roast time-temperature chart may be held at 130 F or above. Shell eggs not treated to destroy Salmonella must sit in equipment holding an ambient air temperature of 45 F or less.

Ready-to-eat TCS food may be held with no temperature control for up to 4 hours and then discarded. Six hours is allowed only if the food starts at 41 F or below and never exceeds 70 F. Written procedures must exist before the practice begins, and each batch must be marked with its discard time.

Ready-to-eat TCS food held more than 24 hours gets a consume-by date of no more than 7 days when held at 41 F or below, counting the day of preparation as day 1. The limit targets Listeria monocytogenes, which keeps growing at refrigeration temperatures.

Exclude means the employee may not work in, or enter as an employee, any food establishment. Restrict means they may stay but cannot work with exposed food, clean equipment, utensils, linens, or unwrapped single-service items. Vomiting or diarrhea, and jaundice with onset in the last 7 days, trigger exclusion; a sore throat with fever triggers restriction, or exclusion where a highly susceptible population is served.

Norovirus, hepatitis A virus, Shigella spp., Shiga toxin-producing E. coli, Salmonella Typhi, and nontyphoidal Salmonella. Employees must report a diagnosis with any of the six. Only the first five must be reported as a history of exposure; nontyphoidal Salmonella is left off that exposure list.

Not allowed by default: use single-use gloves, deli tissue, spatulas, tongs, or dispensing equipment. An establishment that does not serve a highly susceptible population may use bare hands only with prior regulatory approval and written procedures under Food Code 3-301.11(E). Gloves never replace handwashing: wash before gloving and at every glove change.

The 2022 Food Code lowered the requirement from 100 F to at least 85 F of running water delivered at the sink. It is an installation and capacity standard, not a handwashing temperature. The sink must also stay accessible, stocked with soap and a drying method, and be used for nothing else.

The utensil surface must reach 160 F, verified with an irreversible registering temperature indicator. The final sanitizing rinse must be at least 165 F in a stationary-rack single-temperature machine and at least 180 F in other machines, and no hotter than 194 F at the manifold, above which water vaporizes and carries less heat.

The Food Code ties the three together. At 50 to 99 mg/L chlorine the minimum water temperature is 100 F at pH 10 or less, or 75 F at pH 8 or less; a weaker 25 to 49 mg/L solution requires 120 F. Concentration must be confirmed with a test kit, and quaternary ammonium solutions carry a water-hardness limit as well.

Stack by final cook temperature, with the lowest on top: ready-to-eat food above, then intact cuts and fish at 145 F, then ground meat at 155 F, with poultry at 165 F on the bottom. Any drip then falls onto food that will be cooked hotter than its source.

Required whenever raw or undercooked animal food is offered, and it has two parts: a disclosure identifying the item and a reminder about the risk. A menu that asterisks the steak but never states the risk has the disclosure and not the reminder, and is out of compliance.

Vacuum packing, sous vide, cook-chill, and modified atmosphere packaging create anaerobic conditions that favor Clostridium botulinum and Listeria monocytogenes. A retail establishment that packages TCS food this way always needs a HACCP plan, and it also needs a variance unless it meets the specific controls in Food Code section 3-502.12.

Ice-point method: submerge the stem in an ice-water slurry and adjust the reading to 32 F. Boiling-point calibration has to be corrected for altitude. Food thermometers must read accurately to within plus or minus 2 F, and thin foods such as burger patties need a thin-tip thermocouple.

It is a model, not a federal regulation. It carries force only where a state, local, tribal, or territorial authority adopts it, and jurisdictions may sit on an older edition or write stricter rules. Plan review therefore starts by researching the code the local authority actually adopted.

Food equipment certified to an American National Standard by an accredited certification body, such as an NSF listing, is deemed to meet the Food Code's design and construction requirements. Uncertified or residential-grade equipment has to be evaluated piece by piece, which is why plan reviewers ask for the data plate.

50 foot-candles where an employee works with food or with knives, slicers, grinders, or saws. 20 foot-candles at consumer self-service, inside reach-in units, and 30 inches above the floor in handwashing, warewashing, utensil-storage, and toilet areas. 10 foot-candles in walk-ins and dry storage.

The only backflow prevention with no mechanical part to fail. The vertical gap must be at least twice the diameter of the water supply inlet and never less than 1 inch. A hose left submerged in a mop sink defeats the gap and opens a back-siphonage route into the potable supply.

Arrange receiving, storage, preparation, cooking, holding, and service so product moves forward and never doubles back across raw ingredients. Poor flow forces staff to carry raw poultry through a ready-to-eat area, and that is a design defect no amount of employee training will fix.

Approved plans are not an approved building. Before the permit is issued, verify the physical build matches the approved drawings, that equipment certifications and licenses are in place, and that hot water, warewashing, and handwashing capacity actually perform under load.

A written standard for who counts in an outbreak, built from person, place, time, and clinical criteria such as symptoms or laboratory confirmation. Write it before counting cases: a definition quietly adjusted mid-investigation to fit the suspect food is how investigations reach the wrong conclusion.

The standard interview window for a foodborne illness complaint, covering everything the person ate and drank in the three days before onset. It is a starting frame, not a rule. Hepatitis A and Listeria incubate for weeks, so those histories must reach much further back.

Two or more people with a similar illness after eating a common food. A single case is enough for botulism, chemical poisoning, or another rare and severe agent. Suspected botulism is handled as a public health emergency and reported immediately.

Onset within 1 to 6 hours points to a preformed toxin, such as Staphylococcus aureus or the emetic toxin of Bacillus cereus, because nothing has to grow inside the host. Onset after roughly 12 hours or more points to an infection that must first multiply in the gut, such as Salmonella (typically 12 to 72 hours) or Campylobacter (2 to 5 days).

Traceback follows an implicated food upstream from the point of service toward the processor or grower to find the contamination source. Trace-forward follows the same lot downstream to find everywhere else it went. Outbreak work usually needs both, which is why lot codes and invoices are collected early.

A hold order, sometimes called an embargo, keeps suspect food on site and out of commerce while it is evaluated. The food is tagged and inventoried, and moving or using tagged food is a violation. The hold is released or the food is condemned once the evaluation finishes.

Stool or vomitus specimens confirm the agent in ill people and are usually the stronger evidence. Food samples often return negative because the implicated lot was already eaten or the pathogen was unevenly distributed. A negative food sample does not clear a food.

One sharp peak indicates a point-source exposure, such as a single contaminated meal. Successive peaks roughly one incubation period apart indicate person-to-person spread. A long plateau suggests a continuing common source, which means the exposure has not been stopped yet.

Class I: a reasonable probability of serious health consequences or death, such as an undeclared peanut allergen. Class II: temporary or medically reversible harm. Class III: unlikely to cause harm, such as a minor labeling error. The class drives how far public notification has to reach.

A rehearsal that starts from one lot code and reconciles the quantity produced, shipped, sold, and still on hand. Audit schemes set a time limit for that reconciliation. Failing a mock recall exposes the record gaps while the stakes are still low.

Each firm must know its immediate previous source and its immediate subsequent recipient for every lot. Chaining those records across the supply chain is what makes a traceback possible. A missing lot code at any single link forces a far wider and more expensive recall.

Food safety addresses unintentional contamination and is the domain of HACCP. Food defense addresses intentional adulteration by someone trying to cause harm, so the controls are access, accountability, and surveillance rather than time and temperature.

Covered facilities must complete a written vulnerability assessment, identify actionable process steps, apply mitigation strategies, and add monitoring, corrective actions, and verification. Retail food establishments generally fall outside the rule, but many adopt the same structure voluntarily.

Assure, Look, Employees, Reports, Threat: assure suppliers are legitimate, look at how product is secured, know who belongs in the facility, keep security records, and know how to respond to a threat. FIRST is the companion tool aimed at frontline employees.

A significant threat requiring immediate correction or a halt to operations, such as sewage backup, fire, flood, extended power loss, or a water supply interruption. The permit holder must immediately stop operations in the affected area and notify the regulatory authority; only areas untouched by the hazard may keep running, and waiting for an inspector to arrive is not an option.

Cease operations unless approved alternatives are in place. When water returns, flush the lines, clean and sanitize equipment and ice machines, discard ice and any food or beverage made with the suspect water, and obtain regulatory approval before reopening.

Evaluate the facility before service resumes: verify hot water, refrigeration, sewage, and handwashing capacity, assess and discard affected food, clean and sanitize exposed surfaces, and confirm the emergency response plan was followed. Reopening is a regulatory decision, not the operator's alone.