Source: Rita Jane Gabbett, MEATINGPLACE, 9/28/16

USDA officials met with meat industry executives this week and agreed to look over existing industry data on beef primal and sub-primal trim testing for salmonella before the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) publishes proposed rules to subject those cuts to the same pathogen testing as boneless manufactured trim.

“Yesterday we had two separate conversations with the industry on this,” Deputy Under Secretary for Food Safety Alfred Almanza told Meatingplace on the sidelines of the North American Meat Institute Annual Meeting and Outlook Conference here. “They propose that they have a lot of data. We have a lot of data…. If we intend to do something, we should give them the data we have and they should give us the data they have.”

Earlier this month, Dan Engeljohn, assistant administrator of FSIS's Office of Policy and Program Development, told an industry conference that by the end of the year, FSIS plans to propose subjecting some beef primals and sub-primals to the same pathogen testing as boneless manufactured trim, specifically in pursuit of controlling illnesses from salmonella carried into ground beef.

At the heart of the proposal is concern that, increasingly, further processors, retailers and foodservice customers turn these products into ground beef rather than preserving them as whole-muscle intact cuts, where presumably pathogens would be killed on the surface when cooked.

Industry executives have pushed back, suggesting FSIS already has enough information about these products because the trim that is carved from them at the plant is tested.

Almanza said the information exchange should result in a “more informed document” when FSIS publishes its proposal for public comment.

While acknowledging the industry data, he added that these primals and sub-primals, “are not handled the same way from a small operation to a 310-carcasses-per-hour operation. So you have a diverse industry that does not do things uniformly. Some of them have interventions; some of them don’t. Some of them have pasteurization; some of them don’t.  Those are the things we have to take into consideration.”

Almanza noted, however, “If there is value in some of the interventions that they have, then maybe we take a different approach as to how we write this [proposal].”

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