The Executive Director of the Canadian Pork Council says the new Canadian Pork Excellence program provides a framework that consumers can trust.
The rollout of the PigSAFE and PigCARE components of Canadian Pork Excellence, the Canadian Pork Sector’s revised on farm food safety and animal care assurance program, is scheduled to begin in January with the first on farm evaluations expected to start in April.
John Ross, the Executive Director of the Canadian Pork Council, says maintaining the public’s trust is extremely important and Canadian Pork Excellence provides the elements necessary to do that.
If the Canadian public gives up on your product it’s extraordinarily difficult to sell anything to them to start with and secondly often their reaction is that, if I cant trust this product, it needs to be further regulated and we have more than enough regulation in our business today. We don’t need more of it and we need to maintain that public trust, I think, to help us stay away from additional regulation.
The programs themselves, if you’re gong to bring this forward to Canadians, must be credible. We see so much fake in our world these days that we can easily spot a fake and if your program is not technically sound, it is well delivered, producers understand why we’re doing it, what we’re doing with it, how it matters, those things all help the credibility of the discussion along but if you don’t have that really sound platform to sit on, to stand on you’ll soon find that you have nothing. Consumers recognize that quickly and they will move on.
~ John Ross, Canadian Pork Council
Ross says PigSAFE and PigCARE provide a very credible platform. He says what Canadians are looking for across all agriculture products, not specifically pork, is products that are safe, products that are nutritious and products that responsibly raised and Canadian pork Excellence hits on all of those topics.
