Affinity diagramAt stage I, an identification of difficulties in developing the HACCP plans and other HACCP-related documents was carried out. For this purpose, a group of 18 HTLs (quality and/or food safety managers) from food businesses under study was assembled. All of the HTLs had expertise in developing HACCP plans and other elements of the FSMSs (at least 10 years of experience). During individual meetings of the author with 18 HTLs, each of the HTLs described difficulties (“raw data”) and such results were then grouped by the author with an affinity diagram (Bauer, , Duffy, & Westcott, 2006; Oakland, 2004; Tague, 2005). The core of the affinity diagram was the final list of types of difficulties which was then applied as input data to fill in individual ABCD-worksheets on-site.