Uncovering nuggets of insight during the Missouri bus tour

This was my first year on the bus tour with the Missouri Association of Meat Processors (MAMP), and I have to say, it not only was educational but also was a blast. One of the things I love about our business is all the great “salt of the Earth” people I get to work with. It never fails to be a good time when I get around a bunch of processors. Yet, the trip wasn’t all good times and no business — it consisted of visiting five processors that ranged from custom to USDA inspected.

I’m not going to lie and tell you that it wasn’t a long trip. We covered a lot of ground and were all wiped out at the end, but it was worth it. Niki Cloud of MAMP put together a wonderful educational trip. Not only did valuable friendships emerge and old ones get reinforced, but a lot of information you can’t get anywhere but in person was exchanged. I would love to see all the state associations adopt this fun way to congregate and learn. 

I have to call out Kurzweils’ Country Meats (owned by the unstoppable Chris Kurzweil) as a real delight. His plant has been designed for growth, and considering how good his Burnt End Brats are, he is going to need all that room soon enough. Chris is one of those humans they forgot to put the quit in. Years ago, his plant burned down, and through his relationship with fellow processors, he was able to continue to fill orders until the plant was rebuilt. The fire gave Chris a chance to turn lemons into lemonade and design the plant he always wanted.

His new plant had several features that I liked and wanted to point out to you. First, all the walls throughout the entire facility feature 9 inches of insulation, which is a huge up-front cost but saves money on the back end. Chris also laid out the plant process flow in the shape of a circle from start to finish. Product never has to cross back over any area, it just continues into the packaging room. Chris does a lot of co-packing work, so having a dedicated packing room and yet another for labeling is a huge advantage. 

One of the coolest features I saw, however, is the sanitizer, which is located centrally in the building and has nozzles that go into every other room of the plant. This eliminates a lot of traffic and keeps things simple. He also came up with the idea to avoid potential boil order issues in the area by connecting his sanitizer (chlorine dioxide) to his water storage tanks. There may never be a boil order in the area, but if there is and he finds out after a day of making those fabulous brats, he won’t have to worry about the product. That is good, old-fashioned Missouri logic right there, and I like it! Hope for the best but prepare for the worst!

Chris doesn’t mind talking with other processors about his plant and sharing his knowledge. He even gave me permission to put his phone number in this blog, just in case anybody has questions (I’ll put it at the end for you, so it’s easy to find — more good, old-fashioned Missouri logic right there too!). In exchange, he asked me to add a comment about his dashing good looks and how extremely humble he is despite those good looks. Did I mention that he also has one heck of a great food-safety team here at We R Food Safety! backing him up? I happen to be his consultant. Along with having a propensity for excellent logic, we Missourians are very humble people — did you not know that?

On the bus tour, we also visited Hertzog Meat Co. in Butler. This is a very new and beautiful plant. Todd and his crew hit the ground running. I was there on the first day of slaughter a few months back (we posted about it on our Facebook page!). He is another one of those Missourians they forgot to put the quit in. They have been processing for only about 90 days now, but they already are doing a bang-up job. Congratulations to the Hertzog family for landing their product in Hyvee supermarkets so darn quickly! Like Kurzweils, Hertzog also has extremely good taste in food-safety software companies, just saying. Their QA person, Kassy, has taken the challenge on with great enthusiasm and doesn’t let a thing get by any of them.

Dinner during the bus tour was at Lockwood Packing Company in Lockwood, inside the 35,000-square-foot addition that is being built. Lockwood is gearing up to do 50,000 pounds of snack sticks a day once the addition is up and running. Like everybody else they’re concerned about finding enough labor to run the plant at full capacity. That will bring special challenges, but they hope to be one of the major employers in the area soon and hope that will help them attract workers who might typically commute to the bigger cities for work. I think they will be able to do that. 

We also visited R-H Processing in Rich Hill — which is a custom plant that has been in the family for two generations — and state-inspected Hetherington Meat Processing in Clinton. So much good information is passed back and forth at these meetings. On the bus we were lucky enough to have representatives from the Missouri Department of Agriculture and the University of Missouri Meat Lab.

With deer season just starting in Missouri for bow hunters, one heavily discussed topic on the bus was deer processing — with some of the passengers looking to increase the amount of deer they process and others looking to cut back and focus on other species.  Meanwhile, it was mentioned at Hetherington that they have stopped taking bone-in deer, as other avenues are so much more profitable. Those types of knowledge nuggets are, frankly, industry gold — and they can’t typically be discovered in a Zoom meeting or conference call!

I can’t wait for my next tour! Maybe someone reading this will let me be the tour guide!

— Martha Gore, food safety consultant, martha@werfoodsafety.com

Note: Chris Kurzweil’s phone number: (816) 590-0447. (Admit it, you thought I’d forget!)

Cultured, 3D-printed ‘Frankenmeat’ has a long road ahead, but can’t be ignored

When I first heard of 3D-printed and “cultured meat,” I was once again thankful that when I die, I will not be leaving behind any children to live in this crazy world. Having had so many years of experience in the plant-based, meat-alternative business, however, I also decided that I still should educate myself on these matters.

The companies selling these meat alternatives have some very trendy arguments for why they are a good idea. They say these products can be created with a smaller footprint, meat protein can be grown in an incubator much faster than on the hoof, animals are not put down for the process, and well, gosh golly darn it, we just have so many more people that need to be fed nowadays.

I can see how these products could be considered useful in some of those respects: For example, if you lived on a small island or perhaps a space station, that all sounds good. However, lots of things look good on paper until they hit the real world. You can find people who all thought Communism, extended warranties and New Coke sounded good at one time or another — just saying.

To create 3D-printed meat, you start by removing stem cells from an animal, placing them in a petri dish and putting them in an incubator to replicate. Once enough cells are present, they are then made into a paste, which is put into a printer cartridge then placed in the printer — much like a typical ink cartridge — and printing begins.

The process of “printing meat” reminds me of cake decorating. As a matter of fact, the process can create some interesting shapes, but so far, I haven’t seen any that look like a chicken breast or steak. So, perfection/improvement of appearance and texture are still on the drawing board. The first finished product printed was a breaded chicken nugget. Did I fail to mention that Kentucky Fried Chicken is championing this research? No word yet on whether Colonel Sanders is rolling in his grave.

Anyhow, taste testers reported that it tasted just like a traditional chicken nugget, but when cut open you could see that it was a mass of goo that had bubbled during the cooking process. I do not think that alone would deter chicken nugget fans though, because it really doesn’t look all that different from a cooked, meat-taken-from-the-bird McDonald’s McNugget.

When it comes to beef, they would likely follow the same process to make a paste and are working on a beef burger. As you might imagine, the companies competing for this market share are very protective of their processes, so I was unable to find footage on how they were trying to achieve the coarse-ground look.

Naturally, printing burgers isn’t the only target for these entrepreneurs. (Writer’s note: Naturally? Printing burgers? I’m not sure those go together!)  Some companies are already growing steaks. At the point of this writing, it had been reported that the cost of a piece of cultured steak the diameter of a credit card and about twice as thick is around $60,000 — and doesn’t feature the fibrous muscle tissue look of real steak. The ultimate goal would be to produce Wagyu in a lab setting, which clearly is going to be a few years away.

None of these products are ready to hit the market yet, nor are they approved for sale in the United States. On March 7, 2019, the USDA and the FDA agreed to jointly share regulatory oversight of these products. Two years later, the details are still being ironed out. What I do know is that my own state, Missouri, passed a law saying that meat cannot be called meat unless it comes from a traditionally raised animal. This gives me hope. What the labels on these cultured-meat products will say in the future is anyone’s guess at this point. My only concern is that it must be clear to the consumer. 

This new technology could prove to be a challenge for the meat industry, although I do not see that happening very soon. I also see that there could come a time when traditionally raised meat is much more expensive and sought after. Whatever happens, this is an issue to keep an eye on, and it is important that each state get on the Missouri bandwagon and pass laws now that require meat to be defined as traditionally raised.

— Martha Gore, food safety consultant, We R Food Safety!

Beyond Meat’s ambitions have always been beyond reality

Some years ago, I spoke with the owner of the company that makes the Beyond Burger, and I asked him whom the target audience was for his product. Although I cannot remember his exact words, it truly can be summarized really easily in one word. He said, basically, “everyone” is the target audience for the Beyond Burger.

Now, I personally enjoy a big personality, so I just let that response ride, no problem. I can’t fault a person who truly believes in his product and his mission — heck, anybody would have to in order to dedicate their life to such a mission. It was the next statement, though, that stunned me.

Again, the exact words escape me after so many years — and because I was focused on keeping control of my eyes, which were trying desperately to roll — but he followed up by saying he wanted to take over the meat industry. See, there go my eyes, rolling again at that sort of ambition, which is, frankly, Napoleonic.

My background is food safety and security. I am a Midwesterner, which I like to think means I am a little more practical than our less-fortunate coastal cousins. A very important and practical part of food security is being able to obtain food (often, you hear about “food insecurity” in the news). Food security can take on many forms. I can raise and slaughter livestock. I can also grab my compound bow, head out to the stand and pull down a year supply of venison. That’s good ol’ traditional food security that people in heavily urban and suburban locales cannot possibly obtain, let alone understand. Our monstrous, efficient food supply chain makes it possible for many people to experience food security without raising or hunting for animals. The meat industry supplies enough product to meet that demand without blinking an eye.

Could everyone hunt for their meat or raise their meat in their backyard? Certainly not to the extent of the supply needed today — and that further illustrates why Beyond Burger’s desire to take over the meat industry is beyond reality. You see, I can sustain my own demand for animal protein easily enough, but not even I can raise a field of yellow peas, process them and run them through a half-million-dollar extruder the size of a Greyhound bus if I wanted a Beyond Burger. Are they planning to put a pea field in every yard or just make us dependent on the company and its pea producers? Even if I had a bazillion acres at my disposal here in the Midwest, the climate kind of gets in the way of those Napoleonic dreams. And that doesn’t even get me started on the environmental reasons why Beyond wants to take over the meat industry. My eyes are rolling again. This Missouri girl is not falling for it.

Now, I’ll say this: The Beyond Burger is not bad. They are better after a couple of stiff drinks and some mood lighting. Also, I cannot blame a guy for having big dreams. That is one of the best things about being an American. But the other thing that’s great about being an American is the fact that this Missouri girl can look at reality and tell him he can kiss her 100%-Vegan grits.

He will take over the meat industry when pigs fly.

— Martha Gore, Food Safety Consultant, martha@werfoodsafety.com