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Beef Quality Assurance

Quality Challenges

The importance of Beef Quality Assurance can be seen when analyzing and reviewing the top eight challenges within the beef industry. These quality challenges include

• injection site blemishes
• rib brands
• excessive external fat
• excessive seam fat
• dark cutting carcasses
• inconsistent size of meat cuts
• inconsistent cuts
• non-uniform cattle.

The cost of these defects must be accounted for at some point within the beef industry’s marketing chain. Quality challenges artificially increase the cost of beef to consumers. The net result is that consumers pay more for a lower quality product.

Injection site blemishes cost the beef industry over $200 million annually and cost producers approximately $7.05 per head, according to the 1995 NBQA. In 1991, in fed cattle, 21.6% of all top butts evaluated in the injection site audit had injection site blemishes, with a majority of those being fluid filled. In 1997, this defect decreased to 6.2%, with 0.7% of those being fluid filled.

While this is quite an improvement in six years, the results in non-fed cattle are not as pleasing. During the first audit in 1991, the percent of injection site blemishes in non-fed cattle was found to be 28.9% (7.5% fluid filled) but in November 1997 audit, this increased to 40.9% (3.9% fluid filled). While partly due to the new system of performing audits, the increase should still be alarming to the beef industry.
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• page 1 - Beef Quality Assurance Objective...
• page 2 - The History of Beef Quality Assurance...
• page 3 - Quality Concerns According to Packers and End-Users...
• page 4 - Quality Challenges...
• page 5 - Management Tactics...

For more information on Beef Quality Assurance, contact the Feed Division directly.