MacFarlane Pheasants is proud to announce that all of our pheasant products will now be USDA certified! For over two years,we have been working toward USDA certification. Our birds were USDA inspected for the first time on August 12. Now we can sell our pheasant meat to distributors all over the world!
Before becoming USDA certified, our products were state inspected. It was very expensive to have USDA inspections then, because we had to use processing plants that were several hours away. This expense drove the prices of our birds up. For those reasons, very few of our products were getting the USDA certification.
The road to having USDA inspections has been a long one. It involved inspections of our facilities as well as our processing plant, Twin Cities Pack. The processing plant had to be on board with the changes and comply with the longer inspections and additional expenses. We needed new USDA-approved labels, and there was a lot of paperwork and waiting.
Moving forward, all of our pheasant meat products will be USDA certified. USDA inspectors will inspect at our farm and at the processing plant every day. They will be checking for different grades of birds and for the birds’ conditions. Inspectors will confirm that we are doing everything correctly and following our safety plan. We follow an HACCP, or Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point, plan through the state of Wisconsin. The HACCP is designed to prevent harmful contamination during the production process. This ensures that our finished products are safe.
Other countries require USDA inspection before buying our food products, so we can now sell to places around the world. With the state inspections we had in the past, our whole pheasants and pheasant meat products could not leave the country. We have been working on some bids with cruise lines, who require USDA certification. More international distributors will now be interested in our products, and sales of our pheasant food products will increase. MacFarlane Pheasants considers this USDA certification a historic event, and we look forward to having new clients around the world.
