HACCP and ISO 22000 in Tangier

A HACCP plan under the Codex Alimentarius (CXC 1-1969, substantially revised in 2020) is not reserved for processing plants. Any company that receives, stores, packs or transports food must analyse the hazards specific to its activity: cold chain failures, cross-contamination between products, damaged packaging, pests, labelling or batch errors. In Morocco, this plan sits alongside the ONSSA sanitary authorisation or approval.

ISO 22000:2018 applies in the same way across the whole food chain, transport and storage included, with prerequisite programmes chosen according to the part of the ISO 22002 series that fits the activity, ISO 22002-5:2025 for transport and storage. In Tangier, the question is often raised by European customers, Spanish importers, shippers and distributors: they want to know who controls the product at each link, between the production site and the arrival dock. An ISO 22000 system gives an answer verified by a third party; some customers will ask for FSSC 22000 version 7, which incorporates it.

The service first concerns the logistics providers of the Tanger Med industrial zones, the Tanger Free Zone and the surrounding area: cold stores, consolidation platforms and temperature-controlled hauliers loading for Europe. The product they handle does not belong to them, but their responsibility for its safety is very real, and their customers remind them of it in every contract.

It then concerns seafood trading and processing companies that receive, sort, freeze or pack fish for Spanish and European customers, as well as exporters of fruit, vegetables and food products whose goods pass through the port.

In nearby Tetouan, companies that process or pack food for the local market and for export are in the same situation. For all of them the common point is the same: goods that change hands several times before reaching the customer, and a HACCP plan that must follow those changes.

Tangier has been transformed around its port. The Tanger Med complex, one of the largest container ports in the Mediterranean, links Morocco to Europe by sea and by the truck lines that cross the Strait towards Spain. Around it have developed Tanger Automotive City, the Tanger Free Zone and the Tanger Med industrial zones: a large car-assembly plant at Melloussa and its supplier network, automotive wiring, textiles and clothing for European brands, aeronautics and logistics.

Food processing is not the most visible activity there, but it is very present in the flows. Moroccan seafood and agricultural products leave for Spain and the rest of Europe, and many pass through warehouses, docks and trucks of the region. Tetouan adds its own food companies.

This position changes the nature of the risks. In a factory, a hazard is controlled on a line. In a logistics chain, it is controlled at the interfaces: at unloading, on entry to the cold room, when different products are consolidated in the same trailer, while waiting on the quay before boarding. Every transfer of responsibility is a moment when the temperature can rise, when packaging can be damaged, when a batch can be misidentified.

European customers know this and ask for continuous evidence, not just a certificate. For an operator in the region, a HACCP plan that follows the product from one link to the next and an ISO 22000 system that organises its verification are commercial arguments as much as obligations.

A European importer of fishery products first checks that the dispatching establishment appears on the list of establishments authorised to export to the European Union; for products of animal origin, this listing goes through the Moroccan competent authority. It then asks for the HACCP plan, temperature records from receipt to dispatch, the analyses required by its specification and a traceability test. Shippers who entrust their goods to a warehouse or a haulier increasingly require a certified system, ISO 22000 or a GFSI-recognised scheme depending on what their own customers ask for.

In audits, logistics operators in the region often show the same weaknesses. Cold room temperature is recorded, but not that of the docks or trailers during loading. Products of different kinds are stored together with no analysis of cross-contamination or allergen risks. Procedures do not say who decides the fate of a batch that has suffered a cold chain break. Probes are not calibrated. On the seafood side, the cold between receipt and freezing and the control of histamine in the species concerned lack evidence.