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Requirements for cutting plants

Food business operators must ensure that cutting plants handling meat from poultry:

  • are constructed so as to avoid contamination of meat, in particular by:
  1. allowing constant progress of the operations; or
  2. ensuring separation between the different production batches;
  • have rooms for the separate storage of packaged and exposed meat, unless stored at different times or in such a way that the packaging material and the manner of storage cannot be a source of contamination for the meat;
  • have cutting rooms equipped to ensure compliance with the requirements laid down in Chapter V of Regulation (EC) 853/2004
  • have equipment for washing hands used by staff handling exposed meat with taps designed to prevent the spread of contamination;

and

  • have facilities for disinfecting tools with hot water supplied at not less than 82 °C, or an alternative system having an equivalent effect.

Food business operators must ensure that separate rooms are available if the following operations are undertaken in a cutting plant:

  • the evisceration of geese and ducks reared for the production of 'foie gras', which have been stunned, bled and plucked on the fattening farm; or
  • the evisceration of delayed eviscerated poultry