between zero and one. Plants with higher index values use more sophisticated equipment, do
more frequent cleaning, have superior worker training systems, and/or have other practices and
technologies that are superior in controlling pathogens than plants with lower index values. Data
comes from 35 to 40 questions on five types of food safety technologies given in the ERS
survey. The five technologies are: sanitation, operations, food safety processing equipment,
plant capital investments, and hide removal technologies.

Sanitation and process control effort variable (S) equals the average of the number of
sanitation tasks (SSOPs) in compliance with regulatory standards as a share of all SSOP tasks
performed plus the number of HACCP process control tasks in compliance as a share of all
HACCP tasks performed. Inspectors issue a noncompliance report for any required tasks that are
not performed and maintain a database that has these noncompliance data and also the number
tasks that were performed satisfactorily. The number and type of sanitation and process control
procedures vary across plants. The types of procedures used in the definition were provided by
Ron Eckel and other regulatory experts at the FSIS Omaha, Nebraska Technical Center.

Data

All variables, except capital rental prices, food safety technology, and food safety sanitation and
process control tasks were obtained from the Longitudinal Research Database (LRD) maintained
at the Center for Economic Studies of the U.S. Bureau of the Census. Data from the 2002
Census were used because that year come closest to matching the year when the ERS survey was
conducted. Plants within the dataset were grouped into three industries with similar
technologies: meat and chicken slaughter and processed products.

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