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Massive Recall, Consumer Fears Lead to Changes in Meatpacking Industry

August 19, 2005

At one end of the Swift & Co. plant are pens for cattle. At the other end are shipping docks for boxed beef. That's the cold, simple reality of the meatpacking industry. Between the live cattle and the prepared beef lies an industry that employs more than 134,140 people nationwide and supplies food to the country's restaurants and supermarkets.

The meatpacking industry has been refined with ergonomic innovations, and with a greater emphasis on both food-safety protocols and reducing worker injuries. Yet meatpacking still carries a stigma, which writer Upton Sinclair vividly portrayed in "The Jungle," dating to the early 1900s. "This industry has an image," said Jim Herlihy, a spokesman for Swift. "It has a reputation, but that is slowly changing."

Driving changes in the meatpacking industry are demands by consumers and the government to control deadly pathogens such as E. coli and mad cow disease, also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Market forces, such as the two-year loss of Canadian cattle and Japanese exports, also have pushed packers to extract more value from the animals they slaughter.

In recent years, packing plants have invested money to make plants cleaner and to cleanse carcasses more thoroughly. That's especially true in Greeley, which in 2002 recalled 18.6 million pounds of ground beef because of contamination by E. coli O157:H7, which can cause serious illness and even death. It became the nation's largest meat recall ever. The Greeley plant slaughters about 3,000 cattle a day.

The recall was a "life-changing" event for the plant, said Keith Belk, an animal-science professor at Colorado State University. "It's been truly remarkable the change in the entire culture inside that plant." The plant hired a microbiologist and added several steps to remove possible contaminates, even providing such information to competitors so they, too, could implement similar safeguards.

The industry's efforts have reduced contamination by 78 percent from 2002 to 2004, according to the Food Safety and Inspection Service. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cite a 42 percent decline in E. coli infections from 1996 to 2004. "They've made food safety more transparent between each other," Belk said of the nation's packers. "Essentially, at this point they all do the same things."

Meatpackers are required to test for E. coli. Swift removes samples of meat and fat from 2,000-pound totes on pallets. Five samples are removed from a tote, then combined with 20 samples from four other totes. If the samples test positive, all the totes are removed from the food chain and sent to rendering. Workers also test final hamburger chubs, and USDA inspectors check plant records of those tests.

Another trend on the horizon is mandatory tracking. Tracking cattle currently is voluntary. Some foreign buyers, including Japan, want the United States to implement a national identification system so every animal is electronically tracked throughout its life. Despite a pledge by lawmakers to adopt such a system, it languishes in the negotiation stage. USDA officials project a national animal ID system will be implemented by 2009.

Swift also uses Optibrand, which scans eye retinas and photographs any ear tags, as a way to identify animals at four of its six facilities, including those in Greeley, Colo. and Grand Island, Neb. Swift believes Optibrand is the superior tracking method, because all retinas are unique and, unlike radio frequency ear tags, they cannot be removed. Still, Swift is the only company using retinal-scan technology. "It's a gold standard for traceability out there because you can't tamper with it," said Swift's Mirtsching.

Ideally, animals should be scanned at the birth ranch, at the feedlot and at the meatpacking plant to demonstrate where they moved during their lives. Currently, only a few feedlots, and even fewer ranchers, use Optibrand. But as fear of mad cow and other contaminants spreads both domestically and among international trading partners, the industry will likely respond by implementing such measures to ensure its own survival.