Voluntary “Product of USA” Label Finally Means What It Say
When you walk into the grocery store and pick up a banana, a bag of peanuts, or a package of chicken, the label tells you where it originated. USDA’s mandatory country of origin labeling (COOL) requires that all fruits and vegetables and certain other products—peanuts, pecans, macadamia nuts, ginseng, fish, shellfish, lamb, goat, and chicken—list the country of origin on the label.
But beef and pork are exempt from the COOL mandate. A package of ground beef doesn’t have to tell you where it’s from. Worse, up through last December, that beef could legally have said “Product of USA” when, in fact, it was simply packaged in the US and the animal was born, raised, and slaughtered elsewhere.
It wasn’t always that way. Starting in 2009, mandatory country of origin labeling (MCOOL) applied to beef and chicken. Back then, if meat said it was a “Product of USA,” it really was. Then, in 2015, the World Trade Organization ruled that MCOOL discriminated against Canadian and Mexican beef and pork producers, and beef and pork were exempted from MCOOL. After that, processors exploited a legal loophole to label beef that originated elsewhere as “Product of USA,” confusing consumers.
Now, after six years of pressure from groups like Farm Action, USDA is finally enforcing a voluntary “Product of USA” label for beef and pork. Under the new guidelines, a package of meat can’t say “Product of USA” unless the animal was born, raised, and slaughtered in the US. USDA enforcement of the voluntary label went into effect January 1.
American producers of grassfed beef have been the group hurt most by the labeling loophole. The United States both imports and exports large quantities of beef, but they’re not equivalent—the exports are mostly grain-fattened beef and the imports are mostly grassfed beef. Feedlot beef is too fatty to make good hamburgers, so meat processing plants blend in trimmings from grassfed cattle to get the proper fat-to-lean ratio. Under the old loophole, they could import grassfed beef and still label the hamburger as “Product of USA.”
With that loophole finally closed, packers who want to use the “Product of USA” label will have to source all of their beef from the US. Of course, unlabeled beef could still be from anywhere, which is why Farm Action is still pushing for MCOOL in beef and pork. But at least the voluntary label is a start toward more transparency in the meatpacking industry.
The USDA is launching a campaign to raise public awareness of the new label, using the tagline “Tastes Like Freedom” and providing a downloadable “Product of USA” label for compliant processors to use on their products. Hopefully this campaign will encourage consumers to look for and purchase beef with the new label—which will, in turn, increase the market for grassfed beef produced in the US.
As eco-farmers, we can help by spreading the word that grassfed beef makes the best hamburgers—especially if it’s produced in the USA.
