United States: pork industry launches new common audit to ensure animal care and food safety

After 18 months of industry collaboration, the National Pork Board announces that a new common swine industry audit platform for pork producers, packers and processors is now certified by the Professional Animal Auditor Certification Organization (PAACO) and is available to the public. The new audit tool builds on the existing Pork Quality Assurance®Plus (PQA Plus®) program and expands it to serve as a single, common audit platform for the pork industry.

The overarching goal of the common audit process is to provide consumers greater assurance of the care taken by farmers and pork processors to improve animal well-being and food safety.

To help avoid duplicative, costly and inefficient audit programs that are commonplace in some countries, this new tool is designed to:

• Meet individual company and customer needs.
• Be focused on outcome-based criteria that measure and improve animal welfare.
• Provide clarity to producers about audit standards and expectations.
• Minimize duplication and prevent over-sampling.
• Ensure greater integrity of the audit process through consistent application.
• Provide an objective, science-based platform to facilitate continuous improvement in animal care.

The new common audit framework has several key components, including a new audit tool, instructions for auditors, biosecurity protocols and a platform that will allow audit results to be shared to prevent duplicative audits. The audit tool was beta-tested on farms across the country and is ready for implementation by farms and processing plants across the United States.