Excel Beef Plant At Plainview
Idled Over Alleged HACCP Flaw

By David Bowser

PLAINVIEW — Within two weeks of implementation of a new federally mandated meat safety program, a USDA inspector claims the system has failed.

The Excel beef packing plant here was closed Friday after a USDA inspector claimed to have found fecal contamination on a piece of meat.

News reports indicate that Jesse Privett, the USDA inspector on site, found the contaminated cut of beef Thursday.

Mark Klein, a spokesman for Excel, said some of the product in question had gone out to the loading dock.

"We took the initiative of going out to the truck, opened some of the boxes of beef, and we did find a few pieces of hair," Klein said.

He said the meat shipment was stopped and none was sent to consumers.

USDA refused to inspect the plant's production Friday, forcing it to close, Klein said.

"The USDA has the right to withhold inspection if they believe your HACCP system failed," he explained. "They are saying it failed, and we are saying it worked, because potentially contaminated food did not leave the plant."

Klein said USDA contends that Excel's food safety system failed because trimmers — employees who cut fat off of the meat products — did not find contamination on the product.

The food safety system, known as Hazardous Analysis and Critical Control Points, or HACCP, was mandated for the nation's largest packing plants on Jan. 26. Klein said the Plainview plant, however, has operated under a HACCP plan since 1991 and there has never been a problem with it.

Klein said this is the first instance he is aware of in which inspection has been withdrawn. He said the industry was concerned about such situations even before Jan. 26, because there is provision for no due process.

"An alleged problem was pointed out," Klein explained. "We took corrective action. We gained control of the product, and yet they're saying our HACCP plan failed."

The plant remained closed on Monday.

"We still haven't gotten word from USDA as to when they'll reinstate compliance," Klein said Monday morning. "Part of the problem was that we had the weekend and it wasn't easy for them to get ahold of all the people in Dallas and Washington they needed to talk to."

He said compliance officials have been at the plant inspecting it and talking with employees.

"To the best of our knowledge they haven't found anything," Klein said. "In fact, we're not even sure that what was initially found was possible fecal material."

(Members of the meat inspectors’ union have been critical of HACCP from the beginning. They claim it is unreliable because each plant must set up its own system. Critics of the critics, however, point out that the inspectors’ union has opposed virtually every effort to modernize or improve the meat inspection process, largely out of fear that a truly modern system would eventually replace some inspectors. The union was successful in torpedoing a pilot project on "streamlined" inspection, for instance, that placed plant employees in some non-critical positions previously held by much more highly paid unionized government personnel. It should surprise no one that a union inspector has pronounced the HACCP program a "failure," or that there a question whether the contamination even occurred as alleged. — Ed.)

Klein says Excel is cooperating with USDA.

"Our immediate goal is to get this plant back up and running and 1800 people back on the job and getting 4000 head of cattle bought every day," he said.

The head of the food safety inspection service and the USDA, along with many consumer groups, want the new HACCP system to work, he said.

"It is a science-based system," Klein said. "We're going to be doing everything here to make sure it works."

In all Excel plants combined, he added, microbial levels on products have come down 90 percent over the last 10 years.

"That's with HACCP, some of that's with new technology such as steam pasteurization, training for our employees, the list goes on and on," he said. "We knew there were going to be bumps in the road. Unfortunately, we were the ones that had to go over the first bump."

Excel has five beef slaughter and fabrication plants in the U.S. and one in Alberta, Canada.