Guaranteeing the quality and integrity of pork - An Australian case study

The Australian pork industry is strongly committed to assuring the integrity of its product, with substantial research investment made over the past ten years to develop and implement systems to assure the consistency and quality of fresh pork and to enable accurate tracing of unpackaged fresh pork back to property of origin using trace elemental profiling. These initiatives are pivotal to allow Australian pork of guaranteed eating quality to be successfully positioned as higher value products, across a range of international and domestic markets, whilst managing any threats of product substitution. This paper describes the current status of the development of a predictive eating quality model for Australian pork, utilizing eating quality datasets generated from recent Australian studies. The implementation of trace elemental profiling, by Physi-Trace™, to verify and defend provenance claims and support the supply of consistently high eating quality Australian pork to its customers, is also discussed.

Guaranteeing consistently high quality Australian pork: are we any closer?

Considerable investment has been made by the Australian pork industry over several decades, to address key factors that affect pork quality, so as to improve consumer acceptability of pork and pork products. These outcomes have been utilised to inform on-farm quality assurance programs, develop effective solutions to negate boar taint issues associated with the production of entire males, drive continuous improvement in animal management and encourage new technologies to be implemented in both the production and processing sectors of the Australian pork supply chain. Australian Pork Limited’s Strategic Plan 2015–20 is focused on maintaining profitable and sustainable growth in existing markets and developing strong foundations to support new opportunities, both in Australia and internationally. Guaranteeing that pork available for purchase is always consistently high in eating quality will support ongoing consumer demand for pork through increased consumption frequency. However, achieving this on an everyday basis presents industry with significant challenges due to the many complex interactions among the production, processing and post-slaughter factors experienced by pigs, carcasses and pork that can influence final product quality, either singularly or in combination. The present paper describes recent quantitative studies to determine the size and effect of pathway parameters on eating quality attributes of fresh pork and knowledge gaps identified. Outcomes of consumer sensory studies to inform the development of a non-prescriptive cuts-based eating quality system for pork and commercially validate particular pathway interventions are detailed. Through the implementation of validated pathway interventions to optimise pork eating quality, the overall industry objective is to reduce eating quality fail rates of different pork cuts to less than 10%.