Summertime is grilling time. For millions of Americans that means burgers and sausages on the grill. With the cost of ground beef at an all-time high, there is a tremendous opportunity to promote one of my family’s favorites, the pork burger.
The Boston Butt Burger (BBB) is a branded pork burger product championed by the U.S. Meat Export Federation that has been very successful in several South American quick-serve restaurant chains. Hopefully, successes in international foodservice ground pork marketing can be translated to domestic markets.
The surging burger market makes me think of our friends in the U.S. beef industry and their recent challenges with foreign material. Results from the 2022 National Beef Quality Audit reported incidences of metal contamination from birdshot, and less frequently, from darts or needles used for injections and remaining in carcasses.
Any incidence of metal contamination in a food animal is too many. Identifying metal contamination can be challenging during slaughter, especially if embedded. The presence of foreign metal in trim or ground beef not only damages equipment, but results in products having to be destroyed or recalled.
FSIS post-mortem swine condemnation rates remain very low overall in the pork industry. The primary causes for total carcass condemnation in hogs are localized disease like pneumonia, a generalized disease like septicemia, or a severe abscess, rather than a physical hazard like a broken needle.
Obviously, the integrated nature, and intensive indoor production of most pigs as compared to beef cattle is a primary contributor to not using birdshot to get them back inside the electric fence. Yet, it speaks greatly to the successes of the Pork Quality Assurance (PQA) program.
The original PQA program was started by the National Pork Producers Council in 1989 and evolved into the National Pork Board’s PQA Plus program in 2007. PQA Plus certification is required to merchandise pigs to any major U.S. pork processor. The food safety component of PQA is essentially on-farm Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP), primarily to eliminate incidences of chemical hazards, via violative drug residue, and the physical hazard of metal.
So, pork producers, the next time your friends fire up the grill, encourage them to enjoy delicious ground pork with confidence knowing that your on-farm safety and awareness helps ensure its safety and wholesomeness.
