Pork Industry Launches New Common Audit to Ensure Animal Care and Food Safety

October 29, 2014 — 

After 18 months of industry collaboration, the National Pork Board announces that a new common swine industry audit platform for pork producers, packers and processors is now certified by the Professional Animal Auditor Certification Organization (PAACO) and is available to the public. The new audit tool builds on the existing Pork Quality Assurance®Plus (PQA Plus®) program and expands it to serve as a single, common audit platform for the pork industry. [Source: National Pork Board, October 23, 2014]

The overarching goal of the common audit process is to provide consumers greater assurance of the care taken by farmers and pork processors to improve animal well-being and food safety. The concept of a common audit was first introduced at the 2013 National Pork Industry Forum and reintroduced last June at the World Pork Expo in Des Moines, where a coalition of packers and pork producers explained how the audit is a credible and affordable solution for improving animal well-being.

To help avoid duplicative, costly and inefficient audit programs that are commonplace in some countries, this new tool is designed to:

• Meet individual company and customer needs.
• Be focused on outcome-based criteria that measure and improve animal welfare.
• Provide clarity to producers about audit standards and expectations.
• Minimize duplication and prevent over-sampling.
• Ensure greater integrity of the audit process through consistent application.
• Provide an objective, science-based platform to facilitate continuous improvement in animal care.

The new common audit framework has several key components, including a new audit tool, instructions for auditors, biosecurity protocols and a platform that will allow audit results to be shared to prevent duplicative audits. The audit tool was beta-tested on farms across the country and is ready for implementation by farms and processing plants across the United States.

The Industry Audit Task Force included producers, veterinarians representing the American Association of Swine Veterinarians and packer representatives from Cargill, Farmland/Smithfield, Hatfield, Hormel, JBS, Seaboard, Triumph and Tyson.

Hodges added that the National Pork Board cannot fully deploy the standards of the program without the direct involvement of packers and processors. Many packers have agreed to support the new common industry audit, which means they will utilize the common audit standard when conducting third-party audits.

Pork producers and allied industry can learn more about the common industry audit by going to http://www.pork.org/commonaudit.

Note: To view the news release from PAACO regarding the common industry audit, go to http://animalauditor.org/press.php.