An Alberta pork processor is the first Canadian company to adopt DNA technology for tracing the origins of food.
Sturgeon Valley Pork in St. Albert started working six months ago with the international DNA company IdentiGEN to identify and trace individual fresh meat cuts.
The logo “DNA Traceback, Guaranteed Alberta Pork. It’s in our DNA” will appear on boxed product, as well as retail labels later this year.
“We were looking for a traceback program, and we felt this was one that had very good science behind it,” said company co-owner and marketing manager Dan Majeau, who added a growing number of domestic and export customers are asking for traceback.
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A single and aligned check-off collection system based on where producers live makes the system equal said Chad Ross, Saskatchewan Cattle Association chair.
As the industry struggles with an effective way to identify individual market hogs, he added, this approach best suited his company’s business plan.
Samples are collected from hogs at the plant and stored. This information can aid with food recalls or verify labelled meat programs.
The information can also be correlated in the future to assess feeding programs or breeding lines to improve pork production.
Majeau said costs to the consumer are negligible. The real value in the program is that it replaces ear tags, tattoos and other methods of individual identification.
“DNA traces the product because it is the product versus tracing a label or a bar code, ” said Dennis McKerracher of the company’s Canadian division.
Authenticate systems
DNA can authenticate production systems such as animal welfare programs or hormone free beef in Canadian animals raised for the European market. It can also be correlated with existing identification to increase value and track the animals back to the farm.
“You’re building on the investment producers have in live animal traceability,” said McKerracher, a former hog producer who was involved in the Canadian livestock traceability scheme.
Consumers have to trust that the product they are buying at the meat counter is safe and that it is what the label states, said Ronan Loftus, chief executive officer of the company’s North American division.
“People don’t necessarily want to know that steak came from a particular animal. What they do want to know is that the capability exists if there should be an issue,” said Loftus, a geneticist and founder of the company.
“DNA can help provide a degree of comfort in a very powerful way. It can add confidence if there is a recall scenario (that) it can be effectively managed.”
IdentiGEN Ltd., with its North American subsidiary IdentiGEN, Inc., is a privately held company founded in 1996 as a spinoff from Trinity College Dublin’s Institute of Genetics. The company’s founders were among the first to apply molecular genetic techniques to source verify meat.
IdentiGEN focuses on beef, pork and lamb. It has done little work with poultry because of cost and a narrow genetic field.
Loftus said the traceability debate in Europe started in earnest in 1996 when a link was made between new variant Creutzfeldt Jakob disease in humans and BSE in cattle.
Consumers demanded traceback of food throughout the chain.
The concept worked well for Irish producers who wanted to differentiate their export meat and animals from British beef.
Loftus did not know if producers made more money by participating, other than being involved in a value chain or special contract to supply meat to grocery store chains.
Country of origin can also be verified and it builds the overall brand image.
“Its natural home was in the higher value grocery chains where there was already good quality products. This helped reinforce that,” Loftus said.
A DNA database can also speed up traceback when diseases occur.
The company has not pursued crop research but understands how such technology could have been used in the recent case of deregistered genetically modified Canadian flax finding its way into shipments to Europe.
Loftus is not sure if DNA could help resolve trade barriers that continue to keep Canada meat out of Asian markets.
“If it is about politics, it is not going to be particularly helpful, but if it is about a particular issue, then it could be very helpful,” he said.
If Brazil had DNA samples of its beef herd on file, it would likely not have lost the European market when it was unable to provide full traceback information.
Such a system will not eliminate visual tags for management but can complement the store of information. DNA identification could also work for species such as horses, in which visual ear tags are not desirable, or dairy goat breeds that don’t have ear lobes.
Many purebred beef associations already use DNA for proof of parentage, and the Canadian dairy industry is using genomic information for breeding improvements.
The company recently formed an agreement with the University of Alberta to collaborate on genomics research in livestock to improve value chains. In the collaboration, IdentiGEN will work with the Alberta Ingenuity Centre for Livestock Genomics Technology, a new venture that plans to research livestock genomic technology.
