Abattoir To Customer Traceability

By Judith Kirkness, VP Sales, Minotaur Software Ltd.

Having traceable products is an important part of food safety for meat processors.

Custom kill and cut/wrap services offered by abattoirs for farmers becomes challenging as your business grows. It is easy to ensure you get all the meat from a given animal back to a specific customer and packaged according to their specific cut sheet, if you take one carcass or side into the cut room at a time.

Traceability gets complicated when you grow your cut/wrap room, so you are processing multiple customers meats at the same time, or if you offer further processed items such as sausages. An example of this is where you combine several different customers meats on a single trolley while it is smoked. Often, the farmer or end consumer pays for the meat based on a flat kill fee, plus add-on fees such as OTM, hot weight cut/wrap fees, and fees for further processed items often based on weight. All that information comes into play when billing takes place.

When thinking of introducing technology to optimize the tracking of this process, there are multiple touch points that could be included, to provide traceability and QC collection points, which can provide valuable information you and your customers. You could start with just hot weight and cut/wrap stations and add points as your business grows. Touch points to consider include: 1. Live animal weight (good for live to hot yield, RFID numbers could be scanned while offloading the animals, as these scales funnel animals one by one making it easy to accurately get the

RFID information. The RFID info could be used to track the time each animal spends in the barn and start the traceability of which farmer/customer that animal belongs to, especially if animals are jumpers or get comingled in pens in the barn.) 2. Knock box – this is where information needs to flow TO the operator, such as ‘retain horns or hide’ or keep head on for

BBQ hogs. This requires either a barn card or a screen within eyeshot of the operator. Benefits are the animal tag number can be used to verify the correct animal and instructions. 3. QC station (either part of the hot weight station, on tablets, or an additional station for QC, for tracking inspector results such as condemned organs, OTM, etc.), again tied to the tag number. 4. Hot weight station (records hot weight and ear tag number for retirement) 5. Cold weight station (good for hot/cold yield) 6. Cut/wrap stations (for catch weight finished cut products, plus trim going into further processing) 7. One or more further processing steps like sausage making and smoking or making of ground meat. 8. Packaging of further processed items 9. Bringing everything together for shipping or pick up by the customer

The above steps done by hand works for small operations. Automation can help you scale. Here are some tips we’ve learned from working with abattoirs.

1. Create one or more barcode tags at the hot weight station for each carcass or side, identifying the customer, date, and tag number, so you have something later for confirmation against the cut sheet. 2. The animal can then go in the cooler for cooling/aging and each is identifiable for grading. Options for grading include using a handheld to scan the barcode of the hanging item and storing a grade against it. Or you could print multiple tags, one tag with the grade could be brought to the office for recording the grade against the specific animal, leaving an identical tag on the side. 3. Add bar code to cut sheets, so you have something to tie the cut sheet/order to the right carcass tag. 4. Before cutting, scan to verify the cut sheet barcode and animal you are cutting belong together. 5. Weigh/label everything directly to the customer order, so you have all the serial numbers, items and weights produced for that order together for traceability, billing and to provide the customer with a list. This saves time scanning and could provide the yield on that animal. 6. Get the right tags or labels for an abattoir environment. Our customers like the Avery Dennison Mark III Tag Fast Attachers combined with a waterproof tag.

There is no one process that works best for every abattoir. Technology won’t necessarily help you reduce people, but it should help you increase the number of animals you can process, reduce errors and admin time, allowing you to do more with your existing people. In addition, you will have happy customers when you can provide yield and other information to farmers, along with the right meat back cut just the way they asked.