Dive Brief:
- Tuesday marks the official rollout of new labeling requirements for mechanically tenderized meat products, per the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service.
- On the labels, manufacturers are now required to disclose whether the meat has been mechanically tenderized and include cooking instructions — that tenderized cuts should be cooked more meticulously than intact cuts — to promote food safety
- This new regulation would have originally gone into effect on Jan. 1, 2018, but government officials pushed up the effective date to Tuesday.
Dive Insight:
Mechanically tenderizing meat is a common industry practice, so the costs and effects of the new labels will be widespread for a range of meat processors, large and small.
It's unlikely the new labels will cause a significant hit to any particular company's meat sales, because the prevalence of the labels in stores will illustrate to consumers how common this practice is. The cooking instructions also demonstrate how to remedy potential safety issues.
The costs of providing these new labels, particularly the cooking instructions, could end up saving manufacturers money and reputation costs by reducing the risk of a recall. If pathogens do end up in the meat, cooking the meat long enough often kills those pathogens anyway, so providing cooking instructions is a way for manufacturers to protect reputation and bottom line. That's in addition to improving transparency by giving consumers more information.