Walmart has driven the chicken industry to sharply reduce
salmonella bacteria.
Frank
Yiannas, vice president of food safety at Walmart, told the International
Association for Food Protection (IAFP) annual meeting in St. Louis, Mo., that
contamination rates have declined from 17 per cent to two per cent over the
last two years.
The company
announced in 2014 that it wanted suppliers to reduce salmonella contamination
of chicken parts they supplied to Walmart, but gave them until this June to
meet targets.
The first
three standards went into effect last year and by January the percentage of
chicken parts with salmonella bacteria dropped to five per cent. By the end of
June, it was down to two per cent.
Yiannas
called the rate trend “extremely encouraging,” especially since Americans have
moved away from buying whole chickens in favor of poultry parts such as
breasts, legs and wings. The levels of salmonella are very low when the company
does find the pathogen, he said.
In general,
Yiannas said, companies need to move away from the old paradigm of “just cook
it” for consumer education.
“We need to
just drop it.”
Walmart has
also learned that performance standards work better than prescriptive standards
and that process control validations provide greater confidence than end
product testing.
The Walmart
program stretched through the supply chain, right back to hatcheries.
So if Walmart can prompt this much positive response, why has the industry itself not done this long ago? And what about all those highly-paid government food safety types?
