Best Practice for Offal Collection

Summary

The aim of this project was to establish benchmark data on quality and yield in edible offal collection, for the Australian Meat industry, as there was little available data on the subject either here or overseas. Eight abattoirs participated in the project. The quality of the offal produced as measured by condition and adherence to AUSMEAT specification was excellent.

The introduction of the refrigeration index in 2006 was a significant factor in ensuring good quality across the board. All the abattoirs surveyed, collected as much offal as their facilities, the availability of labour, value of the offal and AQIS condemnations allowed. If labour was short the least profitable items were dropped first. The availability of labour and the condemnation rate due to disease or other abnormality by AQIS were the main factors that affected yield. 

The research team found it difficult at first to benchmark yields for two reasons: 

• There was no consistent form of recording yield data between the abattoirs 
• AQIS does not record condemnations of offal unless associated with carcase condemnation 

This meant that all the abattoirs found it difficult to get accurate yield data. They mainly used counts where available e.g. for runners or percentage of HSCW based on in-house studies. The latter was extremely unreliable due to large variations in offal weight between animals of different types. 

To address this problem the research team developed an Excel-based management tool that was used to benchmark offal yield at the eight participating abattoirs for both beef and sheep offal over two separate weeks. This tool can be used by the industry to develop their own in-house benchmarks at each abattoir and to compare performance with other plants with a similar output. 

Three of the original abattoirs collaborated with the researchers in a further 6-week data survey to validate the repeatability of the data collection system using a further Excel based tool. The tools are not perfect but have shown their ability to provide useful performance data highlighting opportunities for improvement and will be more accurate when AQIS introduces a disease recording system that identifies the amount of offal condemned because of disease.