US: NCC highlights chicken industry’s efforts to reduce food waste
The comments were in response to the agency’s proposed Draft National Strategy for Reducing Food Loss and Waste and Recycling Organics.
In its comments, NCC emphasized several important points and areas for enhancing the National Strategy, including:
Unfortunately, several current and pending regulatory policies either do or would contribute to food waste in the chicken industry, and NCC is urging FDA and USDA to reevaluate these policies.
The first is for FDA to allow surplus hatchery eggs into the breaking egg market that would reduce waste and decrease costs. Due to fluctuating market conditions, broiler hatcheries, in some instances, have more eggs on hand than what they want to hatch. These are known as "surplus" hatching eggs. Prior to 2009 when FDA implemented new rules that changed the temperature requirements for storage, broiler producers were able to sell these surplus eggs to egg processors, known as "breakers", to be pasteurized (cooked) and used as ingredients in products such as salad dressings, bread, cake mix, pasta, pancake mix, mayonnaise, ice cream, pie crusts, sauces, and many other everyday food products.
But unfortunately, FDA’s policy forces the broiler industry to send perfectly nutritious and safe eggs to landfills instead of American’s tables – the very definition of wasting food.
The second is a proposed Salmonella
This regulation will likely result in entire days of production being wasted, farmers having extended out times, delayed shipments of birds and chicks and grocery stores and restaurants being delayed fresh product. If any test comes back positive, processing facilities will be forced to either cook, render or throw away the chicken, when it is perfectly safe to eat when properly cooked and handled. As a low estimate, if just one percent of the over 46 billion pounds of chicken produced each year were discarded or rendered, this would lead to over 460 million pounds of fresh chicken being wasted annually.
"Without spending additional resources, agencies can take action to not only reduce waste but also decrease food prices while increasing their availability for consumers", NCC’s comments concluded. "By working cooperatively towards achieving this goal, innovative solutions can be found".
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