Meat + Poultry - September 2005 - 57

SpanTech ®

Food Safety

Conveyor Systems that do
more than transport ...
they DELIVER!

The MicroSpan powered plastic
chain transfer provides smoother
product transport than roller transfers,
while the compact nose (profile height
of only 0.55"!) accommodates very
small and delicate products.

The Spiral Elevator provides an
elevation change in a very small
footprint, handling a wide range of
product sizes with no adjustments.
Also useful for cooling, curing, and
time delays.

H
The WhisDerTrax® line of modular
flexible conveyors includes Vertical
Offset (shown), Incline/Decline,
Curving conveyors, Horizontal Offset
and more, available with a variety of
plain and specialty chain types.

FOR INFORMATION ON THESE AND
OTHER INNOVATIVE PRODUCTS:
phone: 1-270-651-9166
e-mail: general_info@spantechllc.com
web: www.SpanTechLLC.com

Visit Us!

0TH #S7220
World Wide
Food Expo
Oct. 26-29, 2005
CHICAGO

For more information, see Page 101

MEAT&POULTRY

September 2005

www.MEATPOULTRY.com

Customer concerns
Angie Siemens, vice president for
food safety and technical services for
Smithfield Packing Co., Smithfield,
Va., says customers make a lot of requests concerning food safety. Much
of what Smithfield has in place food
safety-wise is customer driven. "We
hold to what a prudent company would
do and take appropriate food safety
measures, so sometimes we have to negotiate with our customers," she says.
"Our customers are asking more questions, so we sit down and work with
them. But we've made many changes
to increase our food safety over the
past five years. That's a cost of doing
business, and a way to protect our
brand and customer loyalties."
Food safety is not just "government-driven," she adds, but comes
on the heels of third-party audits and
requests for quality assurance data.
The requests come for all areas of the
company's operations, including foodservice and retail.
Smithfield has taken actions to get
quicker results from its testing, mandating that 48 hours to read pathogens
is the cutoff, with some results coming
back overnight, Siemens notes. The
company has P.C.R. capability to do
fingerprinting. "A lot of things have
changed over the past 20 years," Siemens says. "The company's move into
value-added products, many of them
ready to eat, from fresh meat has raised
food safety concerns about Listeria.
It's also raised the visibility of food
safety concerns within the company."
According to Smithfield's Hardin,
inspection inconsistency is responsible for the biggest slowdowns on
the processing line. She is not very
optimistic about how the problem can
be resolved. "Whether you're talking
about inspectors or E.I.A.O.s (enforcement inspection assessment officers), you have different people being integrated into the field. Each one
tends to think that one thing is more
important than something else," she
says. But the increasing numbers of
regulations have in some ways made

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Meat + Poultry - September 2005

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