As the responsibility for ensuring safe, ready-to-eat (RTE) meat products is shifted away from regulatory agencies, and to the meat industry, a better understanding of the critical factors involved in thermal processing is needed. This course is designed for anyone in the meat industry who is responsible for producing safe RTE meat products. All technical and regulatory aspects of cooking, chilling and post-package handling of RTE meat products are covered in this course, with presentations by meat industry experts.This course was developed by the late Erwin Waters, Bob Rust and Lynn Knipe.