Integrated markets | Standardizing the names of meat cuts at retail stores will be more difficult, says industry official
Tenderloin chicken cuts are coming to Canada.
They’ve actually been here all along and known as chicken filets, but an agreement between Canada and the United States to standardize meat nomenclature for wholesale products is ready for implementation.
A pilot project beginning later this month will see the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and the U.S. Department of Agriculture accept each other’s terminology for various meat cuts, without the need to re-label.
In the future, Canadians will sit on a committee with U.S. counterparts to agree on name changes so they will be the same in both countries.
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Robert DeValk, who represented the North American Meat Association at meetings about the matter, said it is but one issue being discussed by the U.S.-Canadian Regulatory Co-operation Council (RCC), and one that proved relatively easy to arrange.
DeValk said there are 24 differences in terms for wholesale meat, and the need to re-label wasn’t serving the integrated market well.
“That started to become a bit of an irritant, so when this regulatory co-operation council started, the idea was introduced very early on that one of the areas where we could probably do some harmonization and get rid of some trade irritants would be the nomenclature part,” said DeValk.
A meat buyers guide that lists the terms for beef, pork, lamb, chicken, veal, game birds and specialty birds like Cornish hens will serve as the template for harmonized language, and a new version is expected to be ready by October 2014.
The update will affect only the wholesale meat trade. Harmonizing the names for cuts at the retail level is a more complicated process and may be difficult if not impossible to achieve, DeValk said.
Ron Davidson, in charge of government and media relations for the Canadian Meat Council, said harmonized wording would be welcomed.
“It just facilitates business without, in our view anyway, any loss of protection for people who are involved in the wholesale trade,” he said.
“We have such integrated markets, it just creates unusual complications to have two different nomenclatures for the same products.”
The agreement was noted by federal agriculture minister Gerry Ritz in a recent Chicago speech as an example of co-operation in meat trade matters involving U.S. and Canada.
Country-of-origin labelling is the biggest issue facing the two countries on the file and one of six initiatives involving agriculture and food that are on the RCC agenda.
