Meat Inspection

Ensuring that animal products meet the highest global standards

As the New Zealand Government’s Recognised Agency for ante and post mortem meat inspection, our specialist staff have over 9,500 years of accumulated experience in meat inspection.

Every year, our 700 (Official Assessors) meat inspectors carry out over 900,000 hours of inspection on over 26 million animals at 70 meat processing facilities.

Partnering with us allows you to tell your story of meat safety, quality and excellence to your customers.

Capability and Capacity

We understand the challenges faced in the meat processing environment and pride ourselves on getting the right people, with the right resources, to the right place, at the right time.

We have experience operating under a regulatory model verified by government veterinarians. We leverage off our current depth of skills, knowledge and technical capability to support operations.

AsureQuality can provide a range of services to the red meat industry including Certification, Training and Laboratory testing.

Training and Employment

In order to be able to complete the Meat Inspection course (New Zealand Certificate in Meat Processing (Animal Products Examination Services)) you must either be employed by AsureQuality or by a meat company that carries out their own meat inspection services. The Meat Inspection course is learnt on the job and takes approximately 5 months to complete. Being employed by AsureQuality, you are paid while you learn with great opportunities and avenues to secure ongoing employment within a National organisation.

Public courses are not currently available for Meat Inspection training. Red Meat (and other Industry) training is available to the public via AsureQuality’s Training Academy.

For employment opportunities with AsureQuality please view our careers page(external link) and apply for any suitable jobs. 

Quality and Systems

Our reputation of quality is underpinned by statistical and information systems for ensuring compliance.

The Meat Inspection programme is accredited to ISO/IEC 17020 by JASANZ and has Recognised Agency status from the Ministry for Primary Industries. Our systems are aligned and accredited to ISO/IEC-17020.

We conduct ongoing monitoring of performance against regulated targets for inspection decisions and procedural accuracy.

We perform regular audits at a plant level to ensure quality that is underpinned by compliance.

We go beyond core inspection to offer customers added value pitched at the top end of our technical expertise.

Data and Integration

Our Official Assessors record disease and defects in conjunction with post mortem activities as required by the New Zealand Regulator, MPI. AsureQuality’s National Database provides information that enables:

• A snapshot in time to compare results for different diseases and defects against all other plants nationally on a blind basis.
• National trending information reporting for AsureQuality Management
• Statistical Process Control System analytics and compliance indicators
• Trends where further investigation may be required.

Data is collected either electronically using customers’ systems or by using a manual ticket pull.

AsureQuality can provide its own electronic touchscreen system which provides continuous monitoring with each animal having its carcass and viscera set assessed against set specifications. This enables mob data to be supplied to Producers and operational data to Customers. Key benefits with the AsureQuality system are:

• Meat companies, producers, veterinarians, consultants and retailers can be granted controlled access to this information via a secured platform
• Farmers are able to view disease and defect information from their lines of stock at slaughter, and can put in measures to improve animal health
• The service demonstrates the meat processing industry’s commitment to provide a superior service to its suppliers

This service is invoiced to the individual processing site on a per head basis for each animal processed.

The per animal rate at which this service is invoiced is dependent on the stock type and amount of hardware operating.

Please contact your AsureQuality key contact or our customer services for more information : Customer Services(external link)