Veal processing

To continue my series on the American Milk-fed veal industry, I’m going to write about my experience in the veal processing plants. In this series, I’ve already written an overview of the veal industry and about how the calves are fed and raised.

On our tour, hosted by the American Veal Association, we were invited to visit two veal processors in the Philadelphia area. We had breakfast with Wayne Marcho, who told us the story of Marcho Farms. He expanded his business from a few veal calves that he had in his boyhood into a company that employs over 200 people and contracts with veal farms in 5 states. He likes to say it’s a 4H project that ‘got out of hand.’

A photo of Mr. Catelli's father.
I love the history in the meat business.

Tony Catelli invited us to an amazing veal dinner that I’m going to talk more about in my last post in the veal series. His dad started the family veal and lamb business over 70 years ago and passed it to his sons in 1981, becoming Catelli Brothers. Now it is the US division of the family owned Fontelli Food Group, the largest producer of veal in North America with plants in New Jersey and Quebec.

As a meat scientist, I was excited to get to see a new type of processing plant, but what I saw didn’t surprise me in the least. Just like all the meat processing plants I’ve been in, these plants had the highest standards in animal welfare and were immaculately clean and sanitary. They are operated under USDA inspection with their required HACCP plans to ensure that they produce a safe and wholesome product.

We observed harvest at the Marcho Farms plant, and, as with most large processing facilities in the US, Dr. Temple Grandin helped to design and approved the holding pens and live animal handling equipment. The animals are showered with water when they unload off the truck and rested in pens. They are calmly moved to harvest only by employees specially trained in live animal handling. The animals were stunned to render them unconscious and proceed through the process using humane and sanitary procedures just as is done in meat processing plants of all species.

I didn’t have any doubt that the harvest process would be clean and humane because I know the meat industry, and I know the people in it are committed to doing the right thing. Now I can say that I’ve seen it with my own eyes.

A USDA inspection stamp on
a veal carcass at Marcho Farms

Although we were not able to see the harvest side of the Catelli Brothers operation, Mr. Catelli shared that their live animal handling areas are monitored by a third-party animal welfare auditing company. They use video to view their entire process 100% of the time they are in operation.

Marcho Farms uses a lactic acid wash on the carcasses at various stages in the slaughter process to help keep bacteria from attaching to the meat. USDA inspectors observe the live animals and the whole harvest process. They will also look over each carcass and their organs for signs of disease or contamination. The inspector will mark each carcass with an inspection stamp of edible ink.

The carcasses are washed with 180°F water and individually bagged in plastic to eliminate cross-contamination. After chilling 48 hours in a cooler they are graded and cut up. 

The calves weigh about 500 pounds and have carcasses that range from 250 to 300 pounds.

You can see the size of the
veal carcasses at Marcho Farms.
 This man is about 6-foot tall

Veal grading

Just like beef, veal has USDA grades assigned to the carcasses by a USDA grader. Veal carcasses may grade Prime, Choice, Good, Standard, or Utility. Grades are decided based on the conformation of the carcasses (ratio of muscle to bone and fat) and the color of the lean.  The grader evaluates each carcass and designates their grade with a stamp of purple, edible ink.

Marcho Farms also participates in a USDA Process Verified Program called Butcher’s Block Reserve. It has qualifications for Quality grade in addition to ribeye size and lean color. The USDA grader evaluates each carcass and certifies the ones that meet the specifications for the program. It’s kinda like Certified Angus Beef for veal.

At Marcho Farms, USDA graders stamp veal carcasses with Quality Grade or Butcher Block Reserve

stamps based on lean color, ribeye size, and conformation (muscling).

Fabrication

In the meat business, we use the term ‘fabrication’ to reference the trimming and cutting up of the carcasses, so it’s really the opposite of ‘fabrication’. But, that’s the tradition.

Employees wear white frock and aprons,
disposable sleeves and gloves when
handling and cutting the veal.

Just like in all meat processing facilities, the plant is washed top to bottom every day, and company employees and USDA check the plant for cleanliness before they get started. Anyone entering the plant is required to wear clean frocks, hairnets, and hard hats. We had to wash our hands every time we entered, even though we weren’t going to touch anything. Employees who work with the meat wear plastic gloves and sleeves that get changed several times each day.

All of the cutting and packaging rooms are kept at refrigerated temperatures. Several times throughout the process, the veal cuts were sprayed with a blend of lactic and citric acid to control bacterial growth. The veal cuts move through the plant on cleaned, sanitized conveyor belts and in containers we call ‘lugs.’ The veal cuts are packaged ready to set out in the store. Catelli Brothers was the first company to provide case-ready veal and lamb. Once the cuts are packaged and labeled, they are boxed and stored in refrigeration until they are shipped out. Even the shipping dock is temperature controlled and the company places a temperature recorder inside each truck to ensure the meat stays cold.  

Case-ready veal cuts at Catelli Brothers

Mr. Catelli said that most of their veal takes less than 7 days from harvest to retail. That includes the carcasses being imported from Canada! Freshness is very important in the veal industry. Both Marcho Farms and Catelli Brothers said that they are able to trace their veal from farm to fork.

Something I always enjoy hearing about is the plant employees. These two plants employ over 400 people. It’s not easy work. These folks have to work on their feet in cold temperatures wearing lots of protective equipment. But, they enjoy their jobs. Many employees of both of these companies have worked there for many years. Mr. Catelli introduced us to Phil, who has been cutting meat for 57 years.

As on the harvest side, nothing I saw in fabrication and packaging surprised me. The process was clean and efficient. I have no doubt that they are producing a safe and wholesome product. Please let me know if you have any questions.

I wanted to share a few more pictures from the plant.

Some meat loaf blend heading from the grinder to packaging
in the Catelli Brothers plant. It contains veal, beef, and pork.

The carcasses at Catelli Brothers are harvested
in both the US and Canada. So, the
Canadian food safety system inspects
 the carcasses that are imported.

Carcasses at Catelli Brothers are split into two sides like a beef
or pork carcass, whereas those from Marcho Farms are left intact
like a lamb carcass. Each company does what works best for them.

When the meat cutter removes all the meat from the ribs like this,
we say its ‘Frenched.’ These are Frenched veal racks waiting
for the meat cutter to cut them into Frenched veal rib chops.

Veal shanks for Osso Bucco.

Veal cutlets. They have been tenderized.

Transformation Tuesday: from a steer to steaks

Last week, this picture came across my Facebook page.

It’s a little tongue-in-cheek, meant to be kinda funny, but it’s true.

Cattle start out as cute little calves and end up as steaks, but I think this picture does a disservice to that calf and all the cattle that are harvested for beef production.

They really become much more than one steak.

I don’t want to minimize the contribution one calf has to the food supply. If that calf grows into a steer that weighs about 1,200 lbs, it has the potential to contribute to more than 850 individual meals.

One 1,200 lb steer may produce as many as:

·         24 ribeye steaks
·         24 Kansas City strip steaks
·         12 filet mignon steaks
·         30 sirloin steaks
·         12 flat-iron steaks
·         12 pot roasts
·         4 brisket roasts
·         10 round roasts
·         12 lbs. of back ribs
·         2 flank steaks and 2 skirt steaks, which could make fajitas enough for 35 people
·         200 lbs. of ground beef, which would make 600 1/3-pound hamburgers

** You must realize that not every animal is cut up the same. Sometimes meat cutters prefer to cut T-bone steaks rather than KC strips and filets. In my scenario, I ground up a lot of steaks and roasts that some butchers might have left whole because the demand for ground beef is high right now.

Beef meals are not only tasty and filling, they are also very nutrient dense. One 3-oz serving of lean beef, provides 48% of your daily needs of protein, 44% of B₁₂, 40% of Selenium, and several other nutrients including Zinc, Niacin, B6, Phosphorus, Choline, Iron and Riboflavin.

Any way you cut it, one steer will produce A LOT more than one steak.

Last May, I wrote a post about the enormity of the US meat industry. Each week, over 500,000 cattle are harvested for beef and demand for beef is high which means that the beef industry is producing over 425 million meals of beef each week. Crazy!

Meat inspection: Pass or Fail.

I have seen a few urban-myth stories about “Grade D” meat sold in fast food restaurants. These stories make it sound like the meat is barely edible, just a step above dog food. This would imply that meat is categorized on safety with letters like A, B, C, D. That is simply not the way things are done in this country.

When meat is evaluated for safety and wholesomeness, it either passes and is sold for human consumption or it fails and cannot be sold for human consumption. Pass or fail: there is no middle ground.

To be legally sold in the US, meat must be inspected by a USDA inspector. In some states (27), if the meat will not cross state lines for sale, an inspector from a state inspection agency may inspect the meat. Meat that will be sold across state lines or exported must be inspected by USDA.

If animals are to be slaughtered, the USDA meat inspectors must be there and observe the entire process. They have to inspect the live animals before they are slaughtered. At that point, they qualify as passed, suspect, or condemned. Animals that are considered ‘suspect’ are held for a time and reevaluated before they can be passed. Sick and dying animals do not pass inspection. Only healthy animals that can walk on their own are allowed to be harvested for food. 

USDA inspectors observe the slaughter process and make sure the animals are humanely harvested. The animal is required by law to be stunned and rendered insensitive to pain, before the animal dies by massive blood loss that it does not feel. Dr. Temple Grandin has made it her life’s work to ensure that animals are handled and slaughtered humanely in meat processing plants. Meat companies use her methods and advice for humane handling in the plant and humane slaughter. If you are interested, she has made videos of humane stunning of beef and pork that you can watch.

After the animal dies, inspectors observe the entire slaughter process and will look at the carcass and all of its parts and pieces to make sure it was truly healthy and is safe to consume. They look at the head and lymph glands, the heart, lungs, liver and other internal organs. They make sure the carcass is clean and was not contaminated during the slaughter process. I have a blog post about all the steps in the slaughter process that help to make sure the carcass stays as clean as possible.

Once the slaughter process is complete, the inspector will declare each carcass as pass, retain, or condemn. Animals that need further diagnosis are held in a locked area of the plant.  They are “retained” for further testing. Any carcasses that are condemned are deemed inedible and removed from the food supply.

Carcasses that pass inspection are stamped with a purple, edible ink. This stamp will contain a number that corresponds with the plant where the animal was slaughtered. These are called ‘establishment numbers.’ Each USDA-inspected meat processing facility has a unique number given to them by USDA. These are for slaughter and processing plants. You can visit the establishment number page on the USDA website and find where a particular item was processed, or you can look up the numbers of plants by searching where they are located.


This picture came from Jenny Dewey Rohrich and
her blog at Chico Locker and Sausage.

 

Beyond slaughter, inspectors work in all types of meat plants to oversee the daily processes. They may work in the non-slaughter areas of a slaughter plant or in other types of meat plants that do not slaughter animals, such as sausage plants or grinding facilities. They watch all the aspects of production and work to insure that the meat is processed in a safe manner. They may check temperatures of meat or production rooms, make sure everything is stored properly, watch that employees follow all the food safety regulations, take samples of meat or food contact surfaces for pathogen testing, or check that all the food safety paperwork is filled out correctly.

Side note: Inspectors work for the US government and are paid with tax-payer dollars for their 40-hour week. If they work overtime, the companies have to pay for their hours. Many of them work in shifts just like the plant employees do.

A meat product has passed several levels of checking and rechecking to ensure that it was produced safely and labeled correctly before it reaches the consumer with its inspection stamp. Any product that has passed inspection and been stamped or labeled with the USDA inspection stamp is edible and fit for consumption. If it’s not, it failed.

There is no barely-edible or partially-passed meat under USDA inspection.

Here are a few more resources about meat inspection:

·         A video with Dr. Chris Raines about meat inspection

·         Facts and a history of Meat Inspection from Texas A&M University

·         A blog post about meat inspection from Chico Locker and Sausage Co, Chico, CA.

What Temple Grandin wants the world to know: How clean is the slaughter plant?

One of the keynote speakers at a meeting I attended last month was Dr. Temple Grandin, world renowned animal welfare expert. If you haven’t heard, Dr. Grandin's story (frankly I don’t know where you’ve been hiding). She uses her unique perspective as a person with autism to help the livestock industry better understand animal welfare. Her life story has been made into an HBO movie.

Dr. Grandin spoke for over an hour and gave us lots of advice, one piece of which was to tell more of our story in the meat industry. She said that consumers want to know basically two things about their meat:


1. How did you kill it?

2. Is it clean?

I think Dr. Grandin does a great job of addressing question 1 in the beef and pork slaughter videos she made with the American Meat Institute. I will warn you that these videos are graphic, but they are definitely worth watching if you have questions about animal welfare in slaughter plants.

Dr. Grandin encouraged us to share what we know as meat scientists about the answer to question 2. I really felt like she was talking directly to me.

The week before my meeting, I was part of a research team that collected some samples in a beef slaughter plant in Arkansas City, Kansas. (Since I posted this, the plant I visited, Creekstone Farms was featured in a story by the New York Times. Check it out and be sure to look for the pictures from inside the plant.)  As I was watching the process, I found myself in awe of the amazing number of steps that were taken on each and every animal to keep the meat clean. I have spent time in countless slaughter plants, and I have seen these steps in action. When I eat meat and when I feed it to my family, I know that the meat is safe and wholesome because I’ve seen what is done. I’ve learned about it in class. I’ve visited with the researchers who validated the steps. But, to stand and watch it all in action is awe-inspiring.

One of the most amazing facts about these slaughter facilities is how fast they operate. Some may operate as fast as 300 to 400 cattle per hour. The plant I worked in last month operated at about half that speed, but even at the slower speed, that means a new beef carcass rolls past every 24 seconds. If you watch Dr. Grandin’s videos, you can get an idea of how fast the carcasses move through the plant. Another great video to watch is from the Oprah Winfrey show. Reporter, Lisa Ling, toured a beef slaughter plant in Colorado. You can see several of the steps to transform a steer into a beef carcass and eventually, ground beef.

So, these animals are moving through the plant at pretty fast rates, and they roll on a sort of disassembly line past dozens of workers. Each of these workers has a specific job to do. The first few steps in the process have to do with humanely stunning and bleeding the animal and hanging up its carcass on the rail.

Then the disassembly begins.



Skinning a carcass
(It is hard to get permission to take
photos in a slaughter plant. These pics
are courtesy of my friends at Texas Tech
from a plant in Latin America. The process
is pretty much the same as the US.)

Removing the skin. The hide (skin) must be removed. Some plants will wash the animal’s hide to help lower the dirt and bacteria on it, but all plants have to treat the outside of skin as dirty and the meat as clean. Dirty and clean are not allowed to touch. Most of the employees involved in this process will make a few quick cuts with their knives to remove part of the skin from the carcass as it goes by, and then the carcass rolls on to the next employee. When they are cutting the skin, their knives may get dirty. After they make their cuts on each carcass, the employees will wash their gloves and dip their knives into a sterilizer bath containing 180°F water before the next carcass comes to them. That way each carcass is processed using a clean knife.

I would say that the workers spend as much time cleaning themselves and their equipment as they do actually cutting on the carcasses.



Removing the internal organs.
He is not on a moving conveyor,
but you can see how clean his
boots and aprons need to be.

Removing the internal organs. In the videos, you may have seen the workers removing the stomachs and internal organs from the carcasses. These workers are some of the most highly skilled in the plant. This is a very important job because the contents of the stomach and the intestines can be just as dirty as the outside of the hide, and one slip of the knife can result in the contents of the stomach or intestines spilling on the carcass. If that happens, all the meat with gut contents on it must be trimmed away and sent to inedible products. Because this job takes more time and skill, there are several workers doing the same job at once. They actually stand on a big conveyor belt and travel down the line with the carcasses. You may have noticed that the guts and organs are in very close contact with the workers boots and aprons. Once they are finished with a carcass, they will walk back up the line to their next carcass and in the plant I recently observed, they walked through a foot bath with 180°F water and wash their aprons, gloves and knives. So they are essentially sanitizing themselves every few seconds all day long.

All the little details. You may have noticed in the videos that large pieces of equipment are used to remove the feet and huge saws that split the carcasses. Those are also sterilized in 180°F water between carcasses. The tail is often wrapped in a plastic bag to keep it from touching the meat. The large machine that removes the hide is constantly being washed with 180°F water. Places on the carcass where the initial cuts were made are the most susceptible to contamination, so the plants have a steam vacuum machine to sterilize those areas and vacuum any possible contaminants away.

Final carcass prep. The last step in the slaughter process is a final cleaning of the entire carcass. It is actually passed through a steam tunnel or a wash cabinet to kill bacteria that may have found their way onto the carcass. Some plants spray the carcasses with an organic acid rinse to kill bacteria on the surface. Then, the carcass is moved to a very cold room (called the hot box because the carcasses are hot when they go in there) with high air velocity to chill it as fast as possible. It is actually below freezing temperature in the hot box because meat freezes at 28°F. The cold temperatures control the growth of bacteria.

Meatingplace.com has a great spotlight of Greater Omaha Packing and the steps they take to ensure the meat is as clean as possible.

Cleaning the slaughter floor. Large slaughter plants may operate as many as 16 to 18 hours per day (two 8-hour shifts). At the end of the work day, the slaughter floor is usually a pretty dirty place. That’s when the clean-up crew comes in. Each and every night, a third shift of workers will come to the plant and clean the entire place from top to bottom. Every piece of equipment, every surface, every knife, even the floors and the walls are cleaned with soap and 180°F water and sanitized. Every day. Before operations begin the next day, quality control workers will inspect and swab areas of the kill floor to ensure that the cleaning was thorough. USDA inspectors also evaluate the cleanliness of the facility prior to start up. Similar procedures are used to clean the rooms in the plant where the carcasses are cut up, too.

If you ever have the chance to visit a slaughter facility, beef, pork, or lamb, take a few minutes to notice all the steps and procedures that workers use to help to ensure that the meat is processed as safely and cleanly as possible. It is really awe-inspiring. I learn something new every time I visit a facility.
I’m sure this post has generated lots of questions, please feel free to ask. If I don’t know the answer, I’ll find someone that does.