There is a New Meat-Naming System in Town!

Just in time for grilling season, you will start seeing some changes to how meat at the grocery store is labeled. The USDA has approved this new labeling system (created by NCBA and the National Pork Board) that aims to make meat perusing in the store easier for customers. For the past 40 years or so, meat labels have been anatomically based- describing where that cut is located on the animal’s body. So, for those customers that didn’t grow up on a livestock farm or enroll in a meat science class in college, how does knowing where a cut of meat came from help them know what they are getting or how to cook it?

The new labeling system will identify species, whether the meat is from the chuck, loin, rib or round, the retail cut name, and provide cooking instructions to the buyer. The biggest change is expected to be in pork chop labeling. Thanks to modern pork production methods, trichinosis is no longer a problem so the cooking temperature of pork was lowered in 2011. This means pork chops can be cooked similar to steaks now, so they will be naming different pork loin cuts more similarly to beef steak cuts (i.e. ribeye, sirloin, New York, etc.) Hopefully, this information will be helpful to customers when browsing meat at the grocery store.

 

This article explains in greater detail the changes that we can expect to see on meat labels: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/04/03/new-meat-cut-names/2049713/

I think this is a good idea based on consumer research done by the National Pork Board and the NCBA Beef Checkoff program. As we learn more and more about what our urban consumers are not understanding and the importance of communicating with all of our customers, it is changes like this that are going to help everyone be on the same page. We should start seeing label changes this summer, so it will be interesting to see everyone’s reaction to it!