Agri-food

Successful solutions

• Conducted national beef plant and quality audits; developed/improved methodologies for carcass and meat quality assessment; improved meat and carcass grading and classification systems (beef, lamb and bison) and quality standards (pork); developed and assessed commercial grading instruments.
• Contributed to the enhancement of important meat quality and sensory attributes, such as beef tenderness and flavour.
• Developed differentiation strategies, based on pre- and post-mortem factors, for Canadian beef and pork.
• Assessed decontaminating treatments at beef packing plants; developed methods to identify and count live E. coli following decontamination; identified sources of E. coli on beef; provided advice to Health Canada to develop recommendations for cooking non-intact steaks.
• Developed and transferred to the meat sector an effective solution to the costly quality defect of vacuum-packaged beef known as “blown pack spoilage.”
• Assessed risks to human health by tracking the transmission of bacterial pathogens through meat production chains and characterizing bacterial isolates for antimicrobial resistance.
• Tracked transmission, survival and risks to humans of new food-borne viruses; developed methods to extract viruses from saliva, manure, carcass swabs and meat samples.