The Cost of Food Safety Technologies in the Meat and Poultry Industries.
Roberts (2005) and Golan, et al. (2004) have argued that use of new food safety technologies in
the meat and poultry industries can improve food safety process control. Golan, et al. (2004)
also provides some anecdotal evidence suggesting that use of some technologies can improve
processing yields and generate greater revenues. However, food safety technologies are used to
ensure the safety of meat and poultry products and are not designed to raise productivity unless
they constitute an automated system that replaces a manual one. Thus, if a food processing
system is functioning properly, food safety technologies may be an added cost with no offsetting
cost reductions.
The Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) has required plants to perform sanitation and
process control tasks for many years and has recently required plants to identify, implement, and
perform the additional sanitation and process control tasks necessary to maintain a Hazard
Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) plan (Ollinger and Mueller, 2003). These sanitation
and process control tasks are basic cleaning and sanitation requirements and process control
procedures that may be necessary to ensure product safety and may improve product yields. As
a result, performance of these tasks may or may not raise costs.
The purpose of this paper is to examine changes in long-run costs as the effort devoted to
performing sanitation and process control tasks and the use of food safety technologies change.
Previous food safety cost studies have focused on the costs of complying with the PR/HACCP
rule of 1996. Of these, the cost studies most similar to this one are analyses by Antle, Nganje
and Mazzocco, and Ollinger and Mueller who estimated costs of the Pathogen Reduction
/Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (PR/HACCP) rule of 1.3, 0.04 to 43.5, and 0.9 cents per
pound of meat products. Other studies using a national survey (Ollinger, Moore, and Chandran)