Space chicken

With loyal customers at home and growing world markets, Alberta is adopting strict production regulations. A chicken producer explains.

The international space race earns kudos for technological innovations ranging from robotics to Velcro. Closer to home, the Alberta Chicken Producers (ACP) are using a page from the NASA handbook to boost consumer confidence in a food product already renowned for being safe and nutritious.

ACP wants all 320 of its producers to be ready for Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points (HACCP) certification by the end of 2001, says Reg Ference, ACP vice-chairman and a chicken producer at Black Diamond, southwest of Calgary. Originally developed by NASA, HACCP is a detailed scientific food safety process. The acronym stands for Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points and while all food processing plants in Alberta will need HACCP certification in 2001, the ACP’s on-farm application of the stringent HACCP-based guidelines makes it an industry leader at the farm-gate level.

His own farm is one of about a dozen Alberta chicken farms to voluntarily pilot the HACCP program, which requires producers to keep detailed records about feed, flock health and barn temperatures. “We’ve always tracked these things, but now we keep formal records,” explains Ference. “It means a lot more paperwork for producers.”

He hopes an Internet-based technology also being tested at his farm will eventually speed up the information-tracking process.

That’s 228 million pounds per year

Why all the fuss? Because the stakes are high. Alberta’s chicken producers raise about 16 million kilograms of chicken meat every eight weeks. Over 1.25 million kilograms of chicken legs go out of the country to places like Cuba and the Pacific Rim. “If we want to move chicken out of Alberta or Canada we have to meet standards,” he says. “Whether we are shipping in Canada or to an international destination, we apply the same high standards to all markets.

For Ference, whose business handles a nearcontinuous stream of 110,000 birds, it’s all about doing a good job, better.

“If we have an opportunity to offer a safer food to the consumer, then we as an industry should be looking for ways to do that.”