New tools and workflows for risk and contingency management from pig production to pork processing

Offentlig prosjektsammendrag

Technologies and production workflows change at an unprecedented pace in many industrial sectors, including meat production. To ensure safe technology shifts and sustainable production growth, the implementation of new technologies and products necessitates risk management throughout the production chain. A case in point are pork quality defects that presently cause great economic loss to ham producers in Norway and abroad. The emergence of these PSE-like ham quality defects appears to coincide with rapid improvements in pig growth performance, which is due to more efficient breeding strategies and feedstuffs, and the eradication of main diseases. Enduring Growth! assembles a network with all key Norwegian players in the pork sector to make a joint effort into diagnostics, risk mapping and counteraction of the present pork quality issues. We will develop diagnostics and best-practice guideline catalogues for the industry. This will help building competence on measures that can mitigate economic loss. Establishing ham quality phenotyping and identification of novel gene targets can enable pig breeding companies to develop new, balanced genotype selection strategies, which are aimed at high performance and robust pigs. This can contribute to keep one of our partners (Norsvin) at the forefront of sustainable breeding innovation. We will establish diagnostics and risk survey processes, which will be integrated in Animalia's databases. These can provide a valuable early warning tool to trace emerging quality defects, and also to map changes in key risk factors. Acknowledging the long timeline for solving previous meat quality defects (e.g., PSS), we also include a research unit, which aims to establish alternative meat processing solutions. These can help utilizing lower quality meat cuts and, thus, enable rapid risk management strategies while underlying issues are not yet solved.