FSIS Adopts Rule on Sanitation Requirements

October 21, 1999

USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service has published a final rule on updated sanitation regulations for official meat and poultry establishments. The rule converts many highly prescriptive sanitation requirements to performance standards while streamlining and consolidating sanitary regulations that apply both to official meat and poultry plants.

FSIS conducted a review of regulatory procedures and requirements to identify regulations that were outdated or inconsistent with the agency's new hazard analysis and critical control point (HACCP) systems and sanitation standard operating procedure regulations. As a result, the rule just issued is designed to eliminate redundant, difficult to understand, outdated regulations and differences between the sanitation requirements for meat and poultry processes.

Performance standards define the results to be achieved by sanitation but not the specific means to achieve those results. The sanitation performance standards can be met by establishments in different ways, giving the plants more flexibility to determine what is appropriate and sufficient to maintain sanitary conditions and prevent product adulteration.

Under the rule, plants may continue their current sanitation procedures which may be important to very small plants with limited resources. Plants that want to change procedures may do so if they demonstrate the new approach meets sanitation performance standards and other related regulatory requirements.

A technical conference on the final rule will be held in Omaha, NE, later this year.