Four Best Practices for Poultry and Meat Testing

For example, a food safety intervention may affect your product’s water-holding capacity. Without conducting product quality testing, you may be unaware of negative effects on yield and the consumer’s eating experiences.

Food safety is a basic expectation from consumers, but quality also matters, both for initial and repeat purchases. Quality is directly tied with product branding and drives consumer purchasing decisions. If a food safety intervention affects product appearance or taste, sales may suffer accordingly. In addition, even a small decrease in yield from a food safety intervention can result in millions of dollars lost per year.

Data collection, record keeping, and analyses can be overwhelming tasks. To ease the burden and achieve effective food safety systems, it is important to define the goals for data collection, develop systems to collect data relevant to these goals and objectives, and then determine the proper process for analysis to answer the questions. Analyses may be completed in-house if the questions are relatively simple and straightforward. More complicated situations may require a third-party statistician trained in statistical methods to help answer relevant food safety questions and model data for predictive analysis.

When done correctly, data analyses and modeling are effective tools to improve food safety. The data and the answers are in your hands. Using information properly can provide the insights and interventions to help you sleep better at night.

Dr. Alvarado is the food safety technical services manager at Arm & Hammer Animal and Food Production. Reach her at [email protected].