At-home cooks want meat and poultry that is ultra-versatile and can be included in a variety of dishes, prepared in a number of ways.

If you've eaten at a restaurant this year, you're familiar with the diversity of sausage offerings, whether a turkey sausage breakfast sandwich, modern peasant fare of homemade sausage, mustard, potato dumpling and kraut at a trendy restaurant, or just a straightforward bratwurst at a baseball game or cookout.

 Usually when people (myself included) raise the topic of the cost of inventory, we talk about the financing and management costs of holding inventory. However, with spare parts, many people consider these costs to be either conceptual or "sunk" (that is, a cost that cannot be recovered). It is this view of spare-parts inventory costs that prevents many companies from taking action to review their inventory and particularly review their spare-parts inventory-management processes.

In our last column, we introduced the fundamental challenges facing the industry as it works to improve food safety. 

A somewhat unusual aspect to "cured" natural and organic processed meats is that nitrate and nitrite cannot be added as ingredients, because "preservatives" are not permitted in natural and organic foods. This has resulted in alternative meat-curing processes that utilize natural sources of nitrate, typically celery juice concentrate or powder. 

St. Clair Foods is one of the premier foodservice providers for salads and entrees in the United States. 

In response to the demand to operate as efficiently as possible, freezing systems have stepped up to aid in energy management. Most of the improvements that have been made to modern freezing systems are in the areas of control and automation, says Eldon Roth, founder and chairman of Beef Products Inc.  

States continue to develop and implement an efficient and cost-effective animal disease traceability (ADT) system. 

The tide has not turned in favor of overwrap or modified-atmosphere packaging in the retail meat case in recent years.