Meat + Poultry - November 2010 - 57

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58 * Meat&Poultry * November 2010 * www.MeatPoultry.com

in technology, research and more sophisticated process
controls over the past decade have resulted in incidents of
pathogens in beef products dropping 45 percent. E. coli
incidence today is less than one-half of 1 percent of beef
products, he added. But Jobe wants to take his company's
food-safety focus above and beyond the industry norm.
Like many other grinding operations, Valley Meats now uses the
disinfecting agent Sanova, which
consists of sodium chlorite and citric
acid and it kills bacteria on contact
as a pre-treatment processing aid
to disinfect all facets of irregularly
shaped raw materials.
Jobe feels Sanova provides the
Jobe
best assurance that ground beef
produced by his company will be free of pathogens, such
as Salmonella and E.coli O157:H7 without affecting the
meat's quality, taste or color.
"For many years prior to late 2009, we have required
that each lot of raw materials used for grinding to be tested for E. coli O157:H7 prior to receiving using the N60
testing procedure," he adds. "This testing is performed
by our raw-material suppliers who send Valley a COA
[certificate of analysis] prior to receiving. Valley also does
plant audits of its suppliers and runs additional tests of its
own on each supplier to verify their testing protocol and
to validate their test results."
Valley had been having discussions through its affi liation with the North American Meat Processors Association (NAMP) with industry food-safety experts about an
appropriate intervention step since
early 2009, Jobe continues. "Valley, which produces product under
its own J&B brand label as well as
custom formulations for other meat
processors, distributors and enduser operators, had familiarity with
test-and-hold procedures because
of a program it was employing for
Boyle
one of its meat-processor customers," he says. "Valley wanted an intervention step prior to
implementing test-and-hold procedures to lessen the odds
of getting E. coli O157:H7 positives."
Valley decided to pursue Sanova as an intervention step
because of recommendations from industry food-safety
leaders, and because Sanova was being used successfully at other grinding operations, some of which were also
NAMP members, Jobe says.
It took a significant amount of testing and verification
by Ecolab (the owner of the Sanova system) to prove the
efficacy of the system based on the raw materials and processes used by Valley Meats.
"After implementing Sanova, we knew we wanted to

Meat + Poultry - November 2010

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