UnCOOL regulations on meat packers

The new country-of-origin labeling (COOL) mandates will burden the meat packing industry and they may impact your grocery bills.

These new USDA regulations will soon force meat packers to label steaks, ribs, and other cuts of meat with information such as: “Born in Mexico. Raised in Canada. Slaughtered in the U.S.A.” Many individuals favor such regulations, often thinking who could possibly be against consumers having more information? But they often don’t seriously consider that information is never free—it must be recorded by someone, somehow, and measures must be taken to ensure its accuracy.

In this case, the burden is significant. As a government-mandated precaution against mix-ups, the COOL regulations require those in the supply chain to keep livestock from different countries in separate areas. Normally, for example, a Texas rancher will keep all of his cattle in the same area. But the COOL regulations force him to build and maintain a separate enclosure to segregate the Mexican-born cattle from the U.S.-born cattle. They will also force him to keep the separately labeled meat products segregated in his coolers, develop new SKUs to account for these separate products, and hire new staff to help do all of this extra work created by the government. In effect, these mandates will force beef farmers to unnecessarily duplicate operations and suffer the consequences. The American Meat Institute estimates that all of these extra procedures could easily cost a beef farm millions of dollars annually.

Information is never free. As enforced by the new USDA rules, this country-of-origin information comes at great expense to the meat packing industry and likely at the expense of all of us who like to eat cuts of beef, pork, and chicken.

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