July 2009

Fresh Country Air

By Matt Reese


Several years ago, I was traveling in the Czech Republic and one of the top rules to remember was not to drink the water. While locals drank straight from the tap with no repercussions, we were warned that our weak American immune systems would be no match for the water that was somewhat dodgier than we were used to.
One evening I was particularly thirsty after a day of walking in the hot sun and a glass of water from the hotel room was pretty tempting. Being a stout-stomached young man with a rural Ohio background, I figured that just a little water would not hurt. Unfortunately for the trip, my assumption proved incorrect and led to some pretty undesirable consequences, especially since I didn’t know the local term for “Pepto-Bismol.”
We are fortunate in this country to have plenty of clean water, a clean environment and a level of food safety not enjoyed by most immune systems of the world. There is a current effort underway to set global standards for food safety around the world that, in most cases, U.S. food processors are already exceeding.
“Right now, there is a new global initiative for food safety standards,” said Dale Hart, director of food processing for Cooper Farms in northwest Ohio. “We already meet and exceed requirements and, for us, it is just a matter of doing the paperwork for certification. We just hope our overseas competitors live up to their end of the bargain. We have some concerns about that.”
Food safety is serious business at Cooper Farms, a leading wholesale supplier of pre-cooked and ready-to-cook turkey products to customers around the United States and in Mexico. From the live bird care through the purchase by the consumer, Cooper Farms takes extensive measures to ensure that their products are safe.
“We have a responsibility to provide safe food and we take a lot of pride in that. Our standards are actually tighter guidelines than the government requires,” Hart said. “We have six full-time employees in the food division just to handle certification, quantification and documentation of the food safety regulations we follow. When you look at the Cooper Farm team members for food safety, we have more than 30 people, aside from the top management, who are just monitoring and maintaining controls for food safety. Food safety is not taken lightly here.”
In addition to the Cooper Farms staff, the facilities are subject to rigorous and regular inspection from U.S. Department of Agriculture officials.
“Both of our processing locations are inspected and governed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. There are four people onsite during the day at one site and at the other site they have 24-hour access. During a harvest operation they practically live at the plant,” Hart said. “All of our plants have a Hazardous Analysis of Critical Control Points (HACCP) plan under USDA guidelines. We also have a team at each location that meets on a weekly basis to review our plan and to make sure that our controls are in place with regard to our HACCP plan.”
To go the extra mile with food safety, Cooper Farms has what they call “seek and find” teams that are comprised of people not trained in food safety to visually inspect the facilities from a consumer’s standpoint.
“Seek and find teams go out looking for any potentially unclean conditions that could lead to problems. They look for the things that may not be required and conditions that may look dirty. We do a lot of proactive work to be sure that our sanitation procedures and cleanliness are maintained,” Hart said. “We do this to make sure our story is true. It is not that we think it is clean. It is clean because everything we do is science based. We prove it is clean with numbers and we give it the seek and find test as well.”
Like countless other food processing businesses in the state and country, Cooper Farms goes the extra mile for food safety because they know that business depends on the safety of their food.
“We need to do this to make sure we are protecting our consumers and our business,” he said. “We always consider that what we are making today may be eaten by our grandmas.”
We are truly blessed to live in a country where our immune systems enjoy the world’s safest food supply and a meal (complete with a glass of water) does not require a side of Pepto-Bismol to keep your immune system in Czech.

Matt Reese writes for Ohio’s Country Journal and lives in Baltimore, Ohio. For questions or comments, please contact him at mkcreese@yahoo.com. This column was brought to you by Ohio’s agricultural organizations.