Meat and meat hygiene

This section covers the licensing, inspection and reporting regimes which govern the meat production and processing industries.

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Working with the meat industry

The Food Standards Agency is responsible for meat inspection duties in fresh meat premises in England, Scotland and Wales. It is the role of Agency to help ensure that the meat industry safeguards the health of the public, and the health and welfare of animals at slaughter.

Meat Industry Guide (MIG): food hygiene and other regulations for the UK meat industry

Guidance, produced to assist UK meat plant operators whose premises require approval and veterinary control under the European Union Food Hygiene Regulations, has been updated and is available online.

Wild game guide: a guide to food hygiene legislation

The guide is for people who shoot wild game and supply it either in-fur or in-feather or as small quantities of wild game meat. It gives information on hygiene regulations and ways to make sure meat is safe to eat.

HACCP in meat plants

Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP), is used to describe an internationally recognised way of managing food safety and protecting consumers. It is a requirement of EU food hygiene legislation that applies to all food business operators except farmers and growers.

Meat Guidance

Guidance notes for Meat Regulations

Clean livestock

The Clean Livestock Policy sets out the standards for acceptable and unacceptable levels of cleanliness for cattle and sheep being presented for slaughter. It was published in September 1997 by the then Meat Hygiene Service (MHS) to improve hygiene standards following the fatal E-coli O157 outbreak in Scotland in 1996.

Approval of meat plants

Under the food hygiene legislation, meat plants require approval unless they benefit from specific exemptions.

Audit of meat establishments

The FSA carries out routine audits of approved meat establishments (that is slaughterhouses, cutting plants and game handling establishments) in Great Britain.

Butchers

This section provides information for butchers, and other people working in butchers’ shops, to help them recognise the food safety risks in their particular businesses and develop procedures to manage food safety to show what they do to keep food safe.

Review of meat controls

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) is reviewing the current system of meat hygiene inspection in slaughterhouses. Meat controls are currently based on a traditional inspection approach developed more than 100 years ago to tackle the public health concerns of that era, such as parasites and defects visible to the naked eye. Today, the main cause of foodborne disease is microbiological.

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