Inspectors with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) sent a series of audit reports to the CFIA between 2003 and 2008 detailing deficiencies they had found at Canadian processing plants, including XL Foods facilities.
These audit reports list findings at XL Foods plants that included sloppy record-keeping, equipment held together by duct tape and, in one case, a gruesome scene of animal blood dripping into edible meat products.
One audit in 2003 found non-compliance with food safety procedures serious enough that the company was temporarily delisted as an approved exporter to the U.S.
XL Foods did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
The audits of Canada’s meat and chicken processing system, conducted by the FSIS’s international equivalence unit, checked to see if Canadian facilities were meeting U.S. safety standards. The USDA performs similar audits in other countries that ship meat products to the U.S.
An inspection in July 2003 at an XL Foods plant in Calgary found numerous problems, including equipment covered with meat, blood and fat from the previous day, inadequate staffing at the slaughterhouse and improper post-mortem inspection of the animal carcasses.
Across town at another company facility, inspectors found condensation dripping onto meat products in the cooler and numerous failings with required documentation.
The company was delisted the same day.
It was reinstated in 2004, but the following year, was warned it could be sanctioned again. The 2005 audit found problems with sanitation procedures and drew special attention to a plastic strip curtain used to separate processing areas at one facility.
“Both raw, edible, unpackaged product and inedible product moved through these curtains and the handling practices observed presented a great potential for cross contamination,” the report said.
The audit also found problems with the record-keeping of XL Foods’s Pathogen Reduction/Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point Systems— known as HACCPs.
“Almost every HACCP record observed was incomplete yet had been pre-shipment reviewed numerous times.”
There were also problems with retention of records from the facility’s pest-control program.
Another inspection at an XL Foods slaughterhouse in Calgary found potential contamination caused by employees’ boots and pants.
“The traffic flow pattern of employees going to break from the blood pit and early portions of the skinning line could result in cross-contamination,” the report said.
In conjunction with the CFIA, the American authorities decided to issue a Notice of Intention to Delist, effectively warning that it could no longer export to the U.S. unless the problems were fixed within 30 days.
The company appears to have rectified the problems, as there is no indication it was delisted.
But the following year, another audit found more trouble at XL Foods: “Blood and other liquids were dripping off of the needler into a basket of edible meat pieces. CFIA and the establishment took immediate and appropriate corrective actions.”
XL Foods has been at the centre of a political storm after the USDA stopped imports of its products and issued recall notices last month after discovering E. coli bacteria contamination. Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz has drawn fire for the CFIA’s failure to issue its own recalls until two weeks after the Americans. At least a dozen people have been sickened by contaminated products.
The CFIA says its inspectors accompanied the U.S. auditors during their visits to Canadian facilities and took action where necessary to ensure the problems were fixed.
Richard Arsenault, the agency’s director of the CFIA’s meat programs division, cautioned against reading too much into findings in the U.S. audits.
“The writing of these reports often lends itself to conclusions that don’t reflect the overall system,” he said.
The inspectors visited very large processing plants to “stress test” them to reveal systemic problems, he said.
“Making sure everything is impeccably clean all the time is not the easiest thing to do. Plants are always going to have challenges.”
Arsenault also notes that XL Foods was under different ownership in 2003 than it is today. The USDA no longer includes reports of finding at individual facilities in its reports on other countries and instead addresses the food safety systems that are in place.
Before the factory reporters were discontinued, U.S. inspectors visited an XL Foods slaughterhouse in Moose Jaw, Sask., in 2007, where they reported finding torn pieces of old plastic hanging over the kill floor, a loose pipe draining the solid refuse from the offal harvest and a freezer “littered with debris.”
Another audit, released in 2008, described this tableau discovered by inspectors at an XL Foods plant: “a piece of duct tape was wrapped around the hose of the hock sterilizer, a tuft of hair on the support for the carcass skinning rail, blood and residue on the tension adjustment bob for the employee safety wire, and surplus pipes filled with blood and dirt on the floor near the hide puller. Establishment management initiated immediate corrective actions.”
This inspection also uncovered problems with the electronic systems used to track the animals from slaughter to shipment.
“The word ‘cows’ was entered in the field prescribed for the carcass number or the time the monitoring was performed.”
Original Article
Source: ottawa citizen
Author: GLEN MCGREGOR
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