Better Pork February 2017

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Better Pork February 2017 7
The Canadian Pork Council, in a
2015 publication titled Priority
Areas for Strengthening the
Canadian Pork Industry, noted that
“in recent years, the Canadian pork
industry faced growing social pres-
sures, particularly in the areas of
animal health and welfare, the
environment and genetically modi-
fied organisms (GMOs).”
But where are these pressures
coming from?
Julie Lamontagne, communication
adviser at duBreton, a Quebec-based
producer of organic, rustic and raised
without antibiotics pork, put it quite
simply. When asked in a telephone
conversation about the origin of the
company’s label claims, she said,
“Consumers want to feel good about
eating meat.”
That’s what these label claims are
often about.
They come from consumers who
want to pay for them, from the
industry that seeks to market them
and from farmers who realize that the
production of specialty pork can
make a farm, even a small one, viable.
The problemwith label claims
There are so many label claims
floating around – some of them
overlapping – that there is a lack of
understanding about which ones are
which, what they do and how they
work.
True Foods, a governance company
based in Cambridge, Ont., which
verifies label claims for producers,
features 13 such claims on its website.
(True Foods is part of the Grand
Valley Fortifiers group of companies.)
Heather Ferguson, value chain
manager at True Foods, noted in an
interview that, as a governance
company, True Foods does not “set
any standards themselves.” Instead,
the standards they work with come
from the producers.
That’s partly why there is such a
wide variety of claims. Often, produc-
ers and industry develop and apply
them on their own, unless the claims
themselves are regulated by govern-
ment (as with organic products, for
example).
Some of the label claims True
Foods deals with include:
• Raised without antibiotics: This
claim asserts that an animal
cannot have received antibiotics
“from birth to harvest,” nor can
the animal’s mother, if she were to
transfer antibiotic residue to the
animal.
Size matters in specialty pork production
A few of the label claims call for a certain scale of farm.
Not too big, not too small, but just right.
Katie MacDonald, specialist in pork production
systems and the pork value chain, for example, argues
that for the “humanely raised” label claim to be effective,
the farm should be smaller since this size allows for
increased monitoring of the animals.
Heather Ferguson, value chain manager at True Foods
in Cambridge, Ont., notes that some of the farms that
the company deals with are also smaller.
“We try to target a 200-sow farm,” for an organic label
claim, she said in an interview.
And True Foods works with a producer who has 1,200
sows to merit the raised without antibiotics label claim.
So some label claims operate best around the 200
mark, but others can allow for larger-scale operations.
One key point: the farms must not be too small.
“You don’t want to be too small,” Ferguson notes,
“because then you have the auditing expenses.
“Yes, there are some smaller ones … but if you have a
limited amount of animals, that’s putting the expense in
there.”
Farms must be of a minimum size to make the
label-claim verification system function economically,
but they are also not often very large-scale opera-
tions. BP
Commodity hogs are not always appropriate for “free range” pig farming, as they might sunburn if outside
for too long, says Katie MacDonald, specialist in pork production systems and the pork value chain.
Ontario Pork photo
LABELCLAIMS