Preparing for the safe transportation of meat from rural to urban areas

If you're in the business of transporting meat products and carcasses from rural to urban markets, you will often need to engage with refrigerated transport services. In most cases, it is your responsibility to prepare your products for road transport in a safe manner. If you plan to resell the meat products, ensuring they are prepared for safe human consumption is also a top priority.

There are many risk factors that surround raw meat. For example, products can become chemically, biologically or physically contaminated when being handled. Careful packaging procedures must be adhered to when transporting raw meat to new markets. This piece will provide an overview of the best practices for preparing raw meat for refrigerated transport.

Ensuring cleanliness

The first step towards ensuring safe meat transportation is cleaning and packing the meat properly. If dealing with carcasses, they should be adequately cleaned and checked for contamination. Carcasses and meat products should have all blood, vegetation, hair and manure removed before being transported. Such materials can lead to biological contamination when the products are being transported.

You should make sure all meats are free of diseases, rot and any unwholesome appearances. By making sure the meat is clean and free of rot or debris, the products can be transported safely to target markets.

Safe loading and unloading practices

The safe transportation of meat is highly dependent on the manner through which the products are loaded and unloaded. The vehicles transporting the refrigerated meat should be free of contaminants such as fuel, debris, oil or garbage.

Within the vehicle, the refrigerated containers, equipment and other surfaces should be sanitized and completely dry. Moisture during transportation can cause the meat to become contaminated faster.

Keeping the right temperatures

Safe meat transportation involves ensuring the right temperatures within the refrigerated vessels. All meat should remain at 4 degrees Celsius or colder when being transported. It is a good idea to plan pickup and drop off of meat products around the anticipated weather patterns. For example, if you expect a hot day, you can arrange for shipments to be carried out earlier during morning hours.

However, regardless of the outside temperatures, the internal temperature of refrigerators should remain at 4 degrees Celsius and -18 degrees Celsius for frozen products.

Tracing the origin of products

For any meat products that are destined for urban markets, end users will want to know where the meat came from. You should ensure that you can trace your meat products to the specific farm or animal that they came from. In this way, any diseases or complications that may arise can be traced back to the source.