Dear Friend,

The USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) proposed a federal regulation entitled “The Proposed Salmonella Framework for Raw Poultry Products.” This proposal is extremely important and public comments for this proposed rule are due January 17, 2025.

Read the Proposed Regulation Here.

File Your Comments Here.

Simply select the COMMENT button on the page.

Use the concerns outlined below as a template for your comments.

(FTCLDF is working on comments that we will be filing in the coming days, either on our own or in collaboration with other partners,)

Concerns with the Proposed Rule

FTCLDF is troubled that: 

• USDA-FSIS is proposing that the presence of Salmonella at certain levels should be considered to be adulterant and, therefore, prohibited by the Poultry Products Inspection Act. By statute FSIS cannot consider a substance to be an adulterant if it is “in quantities that do not normally render it injurious to health.” 21 U.S.C. 453 (g). While FSIS is proposing a framework for testing and setting appropriate levels of Salmonella under which it is an adulterant, FSIS fails to provide scientific evidence that the existence of certain levels of salmonella in poultry are necessarily injurious to human health. Furthermore, FSIS has long taken the position that raw, whole muscle poultry and meat products are not adulterated by harmful bacteria because the bacteria is killed when consumers cook them. It is also important to note that FSIS is not applying the same bacteria standard to red meat.
  

• The proposed rule fails to provide any scale-appropriate regulations or processes. Instead, it places requirements on any sized facility to build the infrastructure needed to submit microbial samples to FSIS electronically. Some small facilities will be unable to meet the costs, and may close, exacerbating the problem of the overly-concentrated poultry industry.
  

• The frequency of testing is unclear, and the framework does not include scale-appropriate requirements. For the most accurate results, the frequency with which samples are required to be submitted should be based on pounds produced at a plant, e.g. 2 samples/month for those producing up to 250k pounds per day, 5 samples/month over 250k pounds per day.
  

• The proposed rule fails to ensure appropriate safe testing of small producers in rural areas. Samples in remote areas can take up to 2 days to ship to a testing facility and there is no accommodation in these proposals for protecting the samples from temperature damage during travel, resulting in potential sample contamination.
  

• The prior decline in Salmonella reached by regulation has not been proven to decrease human illness, thus the new framework is not based on evidence that it will decrease human illness.
  

• The framework is written to provide FSIS the ability to periodically change the level of contamination that it considers to be adulterated. This approach creates chaos and confusion among producers as well as consumers and should be prevented, especially when FSIS has a track record of altering such programs when it does not see the results it expects.
  

• It is unclear how the proposed regulation will impact the use of custom slaughter or “fee for service,” since processing of a customer’s birds is not intended to “enter commerce.”  Early concerns point to delays in the release of their own products to customers pending test results; potential condemnation of a customer’s product deemed “adulterated;” and increased insurance concerns for producers whose customers may hold them liable for products declared adulterated, among other concerns.
  
  Again, public comments are due January 17, 2025. To file comments, please visit THIS LINK.