Meat and Poultry Plants' Food Safety Investments: Survey Findings

by Michael Ollinger, Danna Moore, and Ram Chandran

Results from the first national survey of the types and amounts of food safety investments made by meat and poultry slaughter and processing plants since the late 1990s provide evidence that market forces have worked in conjunction with regulation to promote the use of more sophisticated food safety technologies. From 1996 through 2000, U.S. plants as a group spent about $380 million annually and made $570 million in long-term investments to comply with USDA's 1996 Pathogen Reduction/Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (PR/HACCP) regulation, according to a survey initiated by the Economic Research Service. The U.S. meat and poultry industry as a whole during the same period spent an additional $360 million on food safety investments that were not required by the PR/HACCP rule.

Keywords: food safety, production cost, microbial pathogens, HACCP, Pathogen Reduction, Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point, meat and poultry processing

In this publication...

• Entire Report
• Report summary
• Abstract, Acknowledgments, Contents, Summary
• Introduction
• Background
• Survey Techniques and Responses
• Findings
• Conclusions
• References
• Appendix