New regulations and greater public awareness are leading to increased demand for food safety in meats. Pork is a potential source of several microbial pathogens that pose relatively high costs to society, including campylobacter jejuni, closteridium perfringens, listeria monocytogenes, salmonella, and staphyloccus aureus. The pork processing industry faces strong incentives, especially in export markets, to improve food safety, extend product shelf life and achieve greater consumer acceptance of product. Both industry and regulators need better information about how to reduce pathogens most cost-effectively.

HACCP is one approach to improving food safety that helps firms decide where to intervene during processing for control of pathogens. Control of existing processes through monitoring and verification may be inadequate to reduce pathogens to desired levels, and therefore firms may consider additional interventions. We examine four pathogen reduction technologies in pork processing: carcass rinses, sanitizing sprays, steam vacuums, and hot water pasteurizer. Three of these four have already been adopted by many large plants; the pasteurizer is the newest technology. These technologies would most often be used post-evisceration and before chilling and fabrication. As plants adopt and add to existing processes, they may want to identify the least cost combinations to achieve pathogen reduction. Choosing such combinations must take into account that interventions may affect different pathogens to varying degrees.

We estimated the cost of individual technologies based on data from input supply firms and drew estimates of pathogen reduction from selected meat science studies. The cost of individual interventions varies from 3 cents/carcass for a cold water wash to 20 cents per carcass for hot water pasteurization. Higher cost interventions achieve greater pathogen reduction. Next we use a simple optimization model to find the least cost combinations to achieve multiple pathogen reduction targets. The highest cost combination of rinses and sprays costs 47 cents per carcass, would reduce pathogens to very low levels, and is comparable to combinations of technologies currently employed in some plants. Use of a hot water carcass pasteurizer might reduce to 29 cents per carcass the total costs of comparable levels of control, and may be particularly cost-effective in improving shelf-life.

It is clear that the cost function is upward sloping for microbial pathogen reduction in the pork industry, and that some interventions or combinations of interventions are more cost-effective than others. The costs of specific interventions are less than 2 % of total pork processing costs, so improvements in food safety can be achieved through relatively modest investments by large plants. Of course, the highly competitive nature of the industry means that firms need to find the most cost-effective interventions. We caution that these results are preliminary in several senses- more studies of pathogen reduction under plant conditions are needed; new technologies are emerging to control pathogens; and the technologies represent only part of the costs of a full HACCP system that includes monitoring and verification.

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