Designing an innovative warning system to support risk-based meat inspection in poultry slaughterhouses

Historically and legally, meat inspection at slaughterhouses aims to ensure public health. Considering the sanitary, technical and regulatory developments, and given the growing societal concerns regarding animal welfare meat inspection has to be rethought based on a risk analysis to reach this objective. In this paper, we propose an innovative risk-based approach for poultry meat inspection based on a two level warning system. In order to meet the objectives of health inspections of animals and animal products, four inspection tasks in slaughterhouses were identified: (1) analysis of Food Chain Information, (2) ante mortem examination, (3) post mortem examination and (4) feedback information. For each health inspection task, a set of food safety, animal health and welfare criteria and warning values were determined on the basis of the opinion of a multidisciplinary expert group and regulations. In this system, observers (OBSs) are responsible for implementing the first level of control by checking all the criteria previously determined. In the event of a warning value for a criterion during the examination, OBSs must alert the experts (EXPs), triggering a request for an expert opinion. After receiving an alert, veterinary health and meat safety EXPs intervene at the second level by taking over the batch and implementing appropriate measures depending on the type of warning criterion involved. The respective skills and missions of OBSs and EXPs have been defined to each verification level by dividing up tasks, duration and actions. To ensure the implementation and traceability of the two-level control system, the values observed for each criterion and actions undertaken by OBSs and EXPs have to be recorded for all batches, either paper based and/or computer-based. To ensure harmonised procedures, the OBSs must undergo national training sessions on ante and post mortem examinations. In addition, to maintain and improve the quality of this first level of the verification process, EXPs may carry out random checks to verify that OBSs are correctly verifying all stages of the slaughter process and correctly detect warning criteria. In case of abnormality, EXPs may send a non-conformity sheet and request corrective measures. This study presents the first warning system applied to meat inspection in poultry slaughterhouses. Our comprehensive work was carried out with the support of a multidisciplinary group of experts, making it possible to formalise an efficient warning system. The next step has been to test this warning system in field conditions, on a sample of French slaughterhouses. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.