The National Chicken Council (NCC) has come out swinging in response to the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) final rule declaring Salmonella an adulterant in non ready-to-eat (NRTE) frozen, raw, breaded and stuffed chicken products such as chicken Cordon Bleu and chicken Kiev.
NCC president Mike Brown said the council is “gravely concerned” about the precedent set and called the move an “abrupt shift in longstanding policy” that could cause plants to close, jobs to be lost and products to be unavailable on stores shelves. The new FSIS rule says any of these products that test positive for Salmonella at one colony-forming unit (CFU) per gram or higher will be considered adulterated, which NCC says is “essentially zero tolerance.”
“We’re also surprised by FSIS’s victory lap here when the agency has no idea if this will move the needle on public health,” Brown said. He said that USDA has invested heavily in developing this policy when there hasn’t been an outbreak associated with this product in three years — and only one in the past nine years. NCC supports effective public health measures and science-driven policy, he continued, saying that this determination “is neither.”
NCC believes a multi-hurdle, preventative strategy works just fine, eliminating the need for FSIS’ recent determination. Clear labeling of the product as “raw,” as well as process controls and stronger attention to raw material sourcing, have been implemented by its membership, and NCC says that has effectively driven down the risk of Salmonella outbreaks in these products. The council “has repeatedly asked USDA to make many of these best practices mandatory, with no response,” Brown said.
NCC believes USDA has underestimated the impact on the annual cost to the industry, and said that more than 200 million servings of this product will be lost annually, 500-1,000 people will lose their jobs, and smaller processors of this product would be driven out of business due to this specific ruling.
The determination of Salmonella as an adulterant in raw breaded stuffed chicken products is a warning shot to the chicken industry that the pathogen is in the crosshairs for FSIS this year, and it is seen as the first step in potentially declaring Salmonella an adulterant in any product. Such a move certainly would be monumental and rare. FSIS first declared E. coli O157:H7 an adulterant in beef in 1994, in the wake of the infamous 1993 Jack In the Box restaurant foodborne illness outbreak which resulted in more than 600 people getting sick and four children dying.
In 2012, FSIS added six non-O157 Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (O26, O45, O103, O111, O121, or O145) to the list of adulterants in beef.
With regard to the raw breaded stuffed chicken products, 14 outbreaks have been associated with these products since 1998, with only one multi-state outbreak (2021) having occurred since 2015. NCC pointed out that the 2021 investigation revealed that some consumers who got sick did not cook the products properly or ensure that they were thoroughly cooked to an internal temperature of 165 F. The industry implemented changes in conjunction with FSIS and the National Advisory Committee on Meat and Poultry Inspection in response to that outbreak, and NCC says it has twice petitioned FSIS asking for mandatory and stricter labels for these products with no response.
