Food Safety and Inspection Service United States Department of Agriculture Washington, D.C.  20250-3700

Office of Policy, Program Development and Evaluation

Meat and Poultry Advisory Committee Staff

The Committee endorses the concept of reinforcing the Food Code by adopting key food safety provisions as federal performance standards.

We also support the concept of developing federal minimum performance standards for critical food safety process control measures, such as cooking, cooling and temperature control, as they relate to meat and poultry products. This will establish national baselines that all federal, state, and local regulatory agencies can readily adopt in a uniform manner. These standards should be updated as additional scientific information become available.

These standards will provide a pathway for industry to develop validated alternate processing methods to meet the performance standards or for regulators to evaluate a variance to the standard.

It is also important to retain or develop prescriptive procedures ("safe harbors") that small entities can follow if they do not have a technical expertise to develop their own procedures.

We recommend that one federal rule be developed for each performance standard that applies to both FSIS and FDA regulated entities.

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Last modified:  November 25, 2002