The USDA's FSIS Announces Effective Date for Meat Grind Ruling

On December 14, 2015, the Food Safety and Inspection service (FSIS) announced it is amending its record keeping regulations to require that all official establishments and retail stores that grind raw beef products for sale maintain detailed records*. The effective date will be June 20, 2016.

The detailed records must include:

• The establishment numbers of establishments supplying material used to prepare each lot of raw ground beef product.
• All supplier lot numbers and production dates.
• The names of the supplied materials, including beef components and any materials carried over from one production lot to the next.
• The date and time each lot of raw ground beef product is produced.
• The date and time when grinding equipment and other related food-contact surfaces are cleaned and sanitized.

Applied Data Corporation (ADC) has been providing retailers with grind traceability solutions for over 5 years with their Meat Grind Traceability Management module, which is an electronic, automated system that captures and records source materials through the meat grind process, providing the information that both retailers and regulatory agencies need to quickly and effectively identify potential source materials that could cause or contribute to an outbreak, at any time.

ADC’s Meat Grind Traceability Management module is installed at a retailer's headquarters or hosted in the cloud and features an easy-to-use browser user interface that enables retailers to quickly implement the software with little investment in additional hardware. The software captures all of the required information from the primal’s barcode with wireless handheld devices.

To learn more about the proposed regulation or ADC’s software solution, please contact our office at +1.813.849.1818 or visit www.AppliedDataCorp.com.

*Read the complete final rule here.