The market for meat packaging is expected to experience significant growth during the next five years, according to The Journey Ahead for the Meat Packaging Industry, a market study from Infiniti Research.

The meat industry uses refrigeration as the air-chilling system to slow microbial growth and maintain carcass quality. In the pork industry, the time between harvest and fabrication is typically 24 to 48 hours.

Sustainability is an increasingly powerful meat and poultry sales trigger.

A historically tight labor market and pandemic combined to test the meat industry’s workforce this spring. The result? A reckoning with long-ingrained challenges.

Few could have predicted the changes the retail and foodservice industries would experience in the first half of this year. And while the past few months haven’t been without challenges, the seafood department was poised for growth heading into 2020 and many of those opportunities remain. 

Andy Hanacek warns that if you haven’t learned the importance of protecting your employees and how to do so, then you haven’t learned a thing from the spring/summer COVID-19 pandemic — which hasn’t really gone away either.

The loss of the foodservice market because of the COVID-19 pandemic has been devastating to the American lamb industry. 

The last time that White Oak Pastures was on the cover of this magazine, it was because owner Will Harris had decided to build a processing plant to slaughter his own grass-fed beef. Over the last dozen years, the company continues to be at the forefront of producing pasture-raised beef.

According to industry estimates, at least one-third of food recalls in North America may directly be related to sanitation, hygiene and material handling issues in food facilities. On an associative note, the CDC lists unsanitary equipment and surfaces as one of the top five contributing factors of foodborne illness outbreaks.

Unprecedented. Uncertain. Historic. Frantic. Challenging. Words have been used daily to describe the sudden havoc COVID-19 wreaked on the food system and the economy as America worked to slow the spread of the disease and save lives while we kept a nation fed.