Abstract
The Cost of Food Safety Technologies in the Meat and Poultry Industries.
This paper uses plant-level micro-data from the 2002 Census of Manufactures, Food Safety
Inspection Service, and the Economic Research Service in a translog cost function to examine
the costs of effort devoted to the performance of sanitation and process control tasks and levels
of food safety technology use. Results suggest that more effort devoted to performance of
sanitation and process control tasks and greater use of food safety technologies modestly reduce
long run costs. These results suggest that plants that put forth effort to perform sanitation and
process control tasks and plants with higher levels of food safety technology use have higher
productivity and lower costs..
Keywords: food safety, food safety technologies, translog cost function, long run costs, meat
and poultry industry.