segments in meat supply chain voluntarily adopt more stringent traceability systems. For
example, Creekstone Farms Premium Beef tracks animals up to the carcasses halved or
quartered using gambrel which contains an embedded RFID (Mennecke and Townsend,
2005).5 There are also emerging businesses providing solutions for a database system to
facilitate forward and backward traceability of agriculture products from field to
consumer such as VeriPrime Certified Traceable and Scoring Ag.6
The previous studies which included traceability questions in their surveys to U.S. meat
slaughter and processing plants are reviewed in the following section.
Literature Review
Hooker, Nayga, and Siebert (1999) surveyed a group of slaughter plants in Australia (41
plants) and meat processors in Texas (65 processors) on food safety activities and
communication opportunities among different segments in beef supply chain. Among
other things, slaughter firms were asked about process modification costs in slaughter
floor due to quality assurance activities (mostly due to HACCP). Processors were asked
about their customers’ food safety demands including traceability of raw materials. In
terms of overall average, 56% of customers demanded federal/state inspection, whereas
only 4% of customers demanded traceability. The mean percentage of customers
demanded traceability increased with the sale size of processors. The mean percentage of
customers demanded traceability was 3% for processors with sale size of $1 million to $5
million, and more than 16% for those with sale size of exceeding $5 million. However,
for the latter two sale size groups, the percentage of customers demanded traceability
varied from 0% to 50%.
Cates, et al. (2006) report based on a national survey of meat and poultry slaughter and
processing plants executed by Research Triangle Institute (RTI) on behalf of USDA’s
Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) in 2004. They surveyed 598 meat and 219
poultry slaughter and processing plants. The survey mainly consisted of questions on the
use of food safety practices and technologies and plant characteristics, and included two
questions on traceability. In terms of backward traceability, they asked if meat and
poultry plants identify and track their products, by production lot, backward to specific
animal and bird growers, respectively. In terms of forward traceability, they asked if meat
and poultry plants identify and track their products, by production lot, forward to specific
buyers (not consumers) of their products. Tables 1 and 2 present a summary the
responses. In conclusion, poultry plants adopt more backward and forward traceability
than meat counterparts, which could be due to organizational factors as poultry plants are
more vertically integrated and have more automated production process (Ollinger, Moore
and Chandran 2004; Hennessy, Miranowski and Babcock 2004). As the size of plants
5 More information about this company can be found at
http://www.creekstonefarmspremiumbeef.com/
6 More information about these programs can be found at www.veriprime.com and
www.ScoringAg.com, respectively.