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.

A Tier-One Grocery Chain Selects and Implements ADC’s Meat Grind Traceability Manager to Over 1,000 Stores

ADC announces that a tier-one grocery chain has selected ADC’s Meat Grind Traceability Manager and implemented the software to over 1,000 stores.

The P-Cubed Meat Grind Traceability Manager provides an electronic traceability record for all meat that is ground in stores, with sanitation records for the meat grinder equipment. 

“To automate the traceability of our meat grind process, we installed ADC’s P-Cubed Meat Grind Traceability Manager to replace our existing paper-based meat grind logs,” said the Director of Food Safety at the retailer.  “Our primary focus was transparent record retention and retrieval; however, we have also greatly reduced labor for our store associates with ADC’s software.”

With the P-Cubed Meat Grind Traceability Manager, store associates use a wireless handheld scanner to scan the barcodes of supplied meat as it is included in each batch of grind. Traceability of grind content data is retained in a centralized repository at the retailers HQ and is available for inquiry and reporting via PDF or exported to Excel for distribution or further review.

In order to ensure all of our stores were using the new meat grind process as quickly as possible, we set a very aggressive implementation schedule of 150 stores per week,” the Director of Food Safety continued.  “Our team then went back in to see how stores were adopting the software and to make sure the new processes were being followed.”

The data collection and reporting solutions meet all current United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) guidelines and best practices for traceability in meat grinding and grind equipment sanitation.  

“We are pleased to see how quickly and smoothly this retailer has implemented our P-Cubed Meat Grind Traceability Manager software,” said Steve Loveridge, ADC’s CEO.  “Meat grind traceability continues to be a current topic in food safety and we continue to work with regulatory bodies and retail food safety groups to ensure our software continues to help retailers meet and exceed these regulations, in the USA and abroad.”

To learn more, click here.

Proposed Meat Grind Traceability Regulation Could Be Law As Soon As Early 2015

On July 16, 2014 the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) proposed a regulation to require retail stores to keep records containing information on the suppliers of source materials used in the meat grind production process*. Industry sources predict the rule could become law as soon as early 2015 and be enforced as soon as late 2015.

Applied Data Corporation (ADC) has been providing retailers with grind traceability solutions for over 5 years with their Meat Grind Traceability Management module and has been following the proposed regulation very closely.

On October 21, 2014, ADC submitted official comments to the proposed regulation**.  These comments were to provide FSIS with information on current solutions available to meet the regulation, as well as to identify requirements in the regulation that would put an unnecessary burden on retailers.

In their comments, ADC emphasized that FSIS should explicitly accommodate the use of electronic recordkeeping for meat grind traceability data because such solutions are already being used by retailers across the country and meet the requirements of the proposed regulation.   

ADC’s Meat Grind Traceability Management module 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.

The Meat Grind Traceability Management module is installed at a retailer's headquarters 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.

*Read about the proposed regulation here.
**Read ADC’s comments on the proposed regulation here.

Meat Nutritional Labeling: Effective Date Quickly Approaching

We're reposting a blog post from November of last year as a refresher on the upcoming Meat Nutritional Labeling.

March 1, 2012 marks the effective date for mandatory nutrition labeling requirements for single-ingredient products and ground/chopped meat and poultry products in the USA.

In December 2010, the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) mandated that on January 1, 2012, the major cuts of meat must have nutritional labeling on the pack or at the point of purchase. Additionally, single-ingredient ground meat must have the meat nutritional facts on the package.1

Applied Data Corporation (ADC), a leading provider of fresh item, recipe management, and scales management software to the grocery retail and food service industries, has extended its systems within InterStore.Net, ADC's Fresh Item Management (FIM) suite of software, to provide readily available solutions to supermarket chains for the upcoming meat nutritional labeling requirements.

InterScale, ADC's brand-neutral scales management system, hosts nutrifacts to the barcode labeling scales in meat departments, regardless of manufacturer, from one centralized H.Q. system. InterScale supports different nutrifacts by vendor/supplier for the same item/PLU across stores. Nutrifacts information must be presented on labels in a rigorous and standardized format. InterScale now hosts these label formats to scales and printers from the major manufacturers, allowing the retailer large savings by avoiding expensive hands-on service calls by the scale provider.

NutriGen, ADC's Recipe Management software, calculates nutritional labeling information from a recipe's sub-recipes and raw ingredients, allowing InterScale to send this data to the in-store barcode labeling scales and label printers.

"ADC is continually working with our clients and the scale manufacturers to provide a solution that will exceed the mandate set forth by the FSIS for meat nutritional labeling," said Steve Loveridge, President of ADC. "Currently, we have some clients who are ahead of the legislation deadline by already hosting nutrifacts to their barcode labeling scales and providing this information on meat packages. We hope to see this number increase as the sunrise date approaches."

InterScale and NutriGen are systems within ADC's InterStore.Net suite of FIM software, which is an integrated software suite to provide greater efficiencies through optimization of food preparation and transformation processes in the grocer's fresh-food departments. InterStore.Net also includes P-Cubed in-store food production software and other specialized meat management modules such as cutting templates, cutting tests and meat traceability management.

¹http://www.fsis.usda.gov/OPPDE/RDAD/FRPubs/2005-0018F.pdf

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