Research Triangle Institute (RTI), under contract with FDA, conducted studies to estimate the costs of implementing HACCP in food plants under FDA jurisdiction. The purpose of these studies was to determine the state of current food safety practices in the food processing industry and estimate the costs of moving from the pre-HACCP baseline to regulatory compliance. The project was conducted in the following three phases:

• Phase I: Collection of data on the 17,000 plants under FDA jurisdiction
• Phase II: Development of the costs of individual HACCP practices
• Phase III: Collection of data on baseline industry HACCP practices

Because the nature of the analyses required by FDA changes over time, the data collected from these efforts are most useful in a flexible analysis tool. Thus, the purpose of this task is two-fold:

• To provide a final report on the outcome of the three phases of the overall project, and
• To provide a Microsoft Access tool that combines the data from the three phases of the overall project and that can be used to analyze the effects of various regulatory options related to HACCP.

This report is organized as follows: Section 1 introduction. Section 2 describes the results of the survey on HACCP practices in plants under FDA jurisdiction (Phase III) and includes a brief description of the sampling frame used to conduct the survey (from Phase I). Section 3 describes the results of the HACCP cost data collection process (from Phase II). Finally, Section 4 describes the interactive Microsoft Access tool that combines the data from the three phases of the project.