Premium Standard Farms (PSF) announced last week that the company will begin providing retailers with fresh pork products that comply with the country-of-origin labeling (COOL) rule because the company can certify that all its pork comes from pigs born and grown at its company-owned and contract farms in the U.S. and processed at its plants in Missouri and North Carolina. The announcement makes PSF the first producer to participate in the voluntary implementation of the COOL rule, which becomes mandatory next year.
PSF communications vice president Charlie Arnot told Feedstuffs that the company already has source verification auditing and recordkeeping processes in place as part of its process verification accreditation from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (Feedstuffs, Dec. 28, 1998), and he said the company is finalizing a label that will describe the U.S. "born-raised-processed" origin of its pork as prescribed in the rule.
The announcement confirms predictions that the best-prepared producers for COOL are corporate integrators with already-existing internal processes and scale that will give them a competitive advantage over other producers in meeting requirements of the rule (Feedstuffs, May 19, and story, p. 26).
COOL was written into the 2002 farm bill and requires that all fresh beef, pork, lamb and seafood and ground meat be labeled at retail, as of Oct. 1, 2004, as to the country, or countries, of origin of the animal, or animals, from which the meat product was produced (Feedstuffs, April 29, 2002). The law does not cover meat in the foodservice trade or poultry.
Arnot said PSF believes the law will have negative consequences for U.S. agriculture, including pork production and trade, but will comply with it. The announcement said the company will begin providing source verification effective July 1.
PSF also said it will also offer auditing training for its key retail customers to help them develop verification programs for origin labels.
The National Pork Producers Council's (NPPC) third in a series of eight papers analyzing its concerns about COOL last week covered the impact of COOL on hog and pork prices in Canada and the U.S. and on the Canadian and U.S. pork industries' structures (stories, p. 24 and p. 26). The papers are available at NPPC's web site at www.nppc.org/issue_brief/index.html.
©2003 Feedstuffs, Miller Publishing Company.