Wednesday, August 3, 2016

Walmart demands safer chicken


Walmart has driven the chicken industry to sharply reduce salmonella bacteria.

Frank Yiannas, vice president of food safety at Walmart, told the International Association for Food Protection (IAFP) annual meeting in St. Louis, Mo., that contamination rates have declined from 17 per cent to two per cent over the last two years.

The company announced in 2014 that it wanted suppliers to reduce salmonella contamination of chicken parts they supplied to Walmart, but gave them until this June to meet targets.

The first three standards went into effect last year and by January the percentage of chicken parts with salmonella bacteria dropped to five per cent. By the end of June, it was down to two per cent.

Yiannas called the rate trend “extremely encouraging,” especially since Americans have moved away from buying whole chickens in favor of poultry parts such as breasts, legs and wings. The levels of salmonella are very low when the company does find the pathogen, he said.

In general, Yiannas said, companies need to move away from the old paradigm of “just cook it” for consumer education.

“We need to just drop it.”

Walmart has also learned that performance standards work better than prescriptive standards and that process control validations provide greater confidence than end product testing. 

The Walmart program stretched through the supply chain, right back to hatcheries.

So if Walmart can prompt this much positive response, why has the industry itself not done this long ago? And what about all those highly-paid government food safety types?