FSIS’s Final Rule on Meat Plant Controls

May 31, 2000

USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service has published a final rule removing remaining requirements for partial quality control programs in meat and poultry processing plants. The final rule follows previous rulemakings that eliminated many PQC program requirements. Plants will now have greater flexibility to adopt new technologies and processed product regulations will be more consistent with the agency’s regulations on hazard analysis and critical control point system operations, improving food safety, according to FSIS.

Quality control programs control variations in processes to make sure products have the same content, flavor, color and texture in every production run. Placing all products and processes in a plant under a comprehensive quality control system is known as "total quality control." A PQC program controls a single product, process, or part of a process.

Some PQC programs control potential health and safety problems, such as the time and temperature for a cooked beef product; others control economic or quality factors, such as the number of pepperoni slices on a frozen pizza. PQC programs used to control product safety have been superseded by HACCP, which verifies that plants use science-based controls in their food production processes to prevent food safety hazards.

FSIS considers current PQC requirements prescriptive and not in keeping with the agency’s new regulatory approach of ensuring industry compliance with performance-based standards. The agency is taking this additional action to reduce command-and-control regulations as part of the President’s Regulatory Reinvention Initiative.

"The elimination of these requirements will give plants greater flexibility to innovate and introduce new processes that will improve food safety," said Thomas J. Billy, administrator of FSIS, "as well as make our regulations more consistent with HACCP."

Among the many changes, FSIS is eliminating the requirements for designing a PQC program and the requirements for a quality control program to control certain ingredients used in products such as frankfurters, bologna, and sausages for calcium, fat and protein content. PQC programs for carcass defects at poultry slaughter plants operating under the "new line speed" or "new turkey inspection systems also will be eliminated; however, FSIS will continue to check poultry carcasses in plants using those systems for visible contamination and defects. Additional changes affect meat and poultry canning regulations, as well as some prior-approval requirements. Implementation of this final rule will also enable FSIS to redirect resources from PQC program verification to higher priority, food safety-related activities.

The final rule is effective August 28, 2000 and the text is printed in today’s Federal Register notice.