Protein Processors Face Higher Risk With Food Safety Issues

"Meat, poultry and seafood processors work with very tight margins, so any cost savings can make a large impact on their profitability," says Dave Howard, regional sales manager for Robert Reiser Co., Canton, Mass. "Many of the machines supplied by Reiser have been developed to help processors save money in some fashion – in labor savings, processing advancements or [because] versatile machines can replace two or three or more other machines."

As an example, Reiser offers its Vemag stuffer that allows sausage processors to make a higher-quality finished sausage with a high density. The result is reduced casing costs per sausage and a significant savings over the course of a year. Vacuum-processed sausage reduces cooking and drying times, Howard adds.

Colgrove says NuTec is always challenged to find new applications for new technologies and to help processors work more efficiently.

"We are looking more and more into development of more ancillary equipment in order to offer our customers more of an integrated systems approach to portion control and portion depositing," he says.

Any discussion of efficiencies with meat processors might bring to mind frustrations over last year's image debacle regarding lean finely textured beef.

"The LFTB controversy demonstrates that consumers' perceptions and understanding of modern food production can quickly affect markets and/or a company's business." That understatement is at the outset of "Lean Finely Textured Beef: The ‘Pink Slime' Controversy," a policy report prepared for Congress by policy analyst Joel Greene.

Giambrone points out that by allowing for additional processing of material, LFTB offered both economy and some sustainability benefit in that a higher percentage of each animal was being put to food use.

Sustainable operations

Water use in meat and poultry process has increased steadily over the years as food safety and sanitation practices have become more aggressive. But green initiatives have led meat plant operators to look for ways to do more with less water. That often means treating, reusing and converting water from one use to another. Treated process water can in some cases find a secondary use in clean-in-place and other sanitation systems or in "gray water" uses.

Like all manufacturing operations, meat plants are becoming more careful about energy use for everything from lighting to the heating of process equipment, says Giambrone.

Consumer concerns about animal welfare are often most visible when bad practices are exposed, but it might be more remarkable to many consumers to learn that Cargill Inc. now uses third-party remote video monitoring to reinforce humane practices in its slaughterhouses. Just last year the American Meat Institute produced a positive video about U.S. beef production narrated by animal behaviorist Temple Grandin, who has long been associated with guarding animal welfare.

While tighter controls and increased scrutiny serve purposes, NuTec's Colgrove wonders if some efforts have gone too far or have somehow missed the mark.

"I now [see] in plants and maintenance shops more sanitation efforts taking place on the tools and components used to service the processing equipment than there used to be to govern actual production of product," he says. "It seems to me we are trying to create an almost purely sterile world or environment in which to operate, all the while discovering new issues to be concerned with. It makes you wonder where it will all end, and just how many processors are going to be able to keep pace with the seemingly never ending [list] of compliance mandates."

In at least one instance, however, the rest of the food processing industry is just catching up to safety processes long in place in the meat industry. Just last month, FDA released for comment the two latest rules of the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), extending HACCP plan requirements to nearly all food processors. Meat plants have been perfecting HACCP for nearly two decades.

This article originally appeared in the February 2013 issue of Food Processing Magazine.