Foreign Buyers Club and Old Meat

[kobegai]

I thought I would share a recent run in I had with Foreign Buyer's Club. (In case you don't know what this is, it is a company that sellls and delivers all sorts of foreign food in Japan.)
Recently, my family purchased several frozen turkey and chicken products--hamburger patties, lunch meat, ground meat. When it was delivered I noticed that none of it had expiration dates. Upon further examination, two of the pieces did have "packed on" dates--both of which were near or over 1 year ago.
I immediately went to the one of the maker's websites (jennie-o) and it said that that the maximum amount of time their turkey should be frozen and then resold is two months! When I called Foreign Buyers Club and told them this they told me I was wrong and that it could be sold for two years--a flat out lie. Then he was incredibly rude about taking back the meat and even had the nerve to ask me to keep it frozen so that they can resell it to someone else!
LONG STORY SHORT--DON'T BUY MEATS FROM FORIGN BUYERS CLUB. THESE PEOPLE ARE MAKING A FORTUNE MARKING UP FOREIGN FOOD WITH NO REGARD FOR THE HEALTH OR WELFARE OF THEIR CUSTOMERS.

 

[themeatguy]

Hey kobegai, nice name by the way. I just wanted to let you know that I think you're being a bit too harsh on the good ol' FBC. What they told you was actually not a lie, by law the expiration date for frozen meat products is two years, or more succinctly, it cannot exceed two years. The manufacturer may well say just two months for a variety of reasons, the main one being quality control. You usually don't want to keep meat in your home freezer for more than about 6 months. Refrigerator freezers tend to hold the temperature at just below freezing for energy efficiency. But every time you open the door warm air comes in so if you are needing ice 3 or 4 times a day that's a lot of temperature fluctuation. This won't cause any food safety issues but the quality of meat will gradually deteriorate over time. So if the maker says two months they are making it harder for customers to come back six months down the road and claim that their products were no good. The other main reason for shorter than necessary expiry dates is to push more product through the distribution channels by forcing the retailers to discount and move out old product. Remember, two months from the time of production for a frozen food product just barely gives it time to come to Japan and get over the jet lag.

Industry grade freezers hold food at much lower temperatures (ours are set at -25 and some go down to -40C). And because the door is really small compared to the total size of the freezer temperatures don't really fluctuate at all. Under those conditions meat can stay perfectly preserved for years. Your product should have had expiration dates on the package, by Japanese law this is the responsibility of the importer but few importers open every case and re-label every package. It's also tricky to get labels to stick onto frozen packages so they sometimes fall off and a product reaches a consumer without its label. This would be a big deal if it were chilled product because many pathogens grow even in refreigerated conditions so anything that is chilled and past its expiration date poses a health risk and should be thrown out. However there aren't any know pathogens that grow in the freezer so even if something is past its use-by date there is no greater chance of food poisoning, it just might not taste as good as it was meant to.

So I don't think FBC was trying to poison you for the sake of profit, obviously the person fielding your phone call did a very poor job of handling it but their organization is made up of a lot of different people and you may of gotten someone on a bad day, also with some 30,000 or so products they can't really be expert at all of them.

For the sake of clarity I should disclose that my company is both a competitor of and supplier (although not of turkey) to FBC. They have a sterling reputation and really are a great company.

-themeatguy

 

[Iron Chef]

A little off-topic but since it's relating to meat i'll ask our resident expert. I have heard from more than one source that certain grocers where meat is sold here use a kind of dye or coloring to make the meat look much more appealing when displayed for customer viewing (apparently adds a bright reddish hue giving it a "fresher" look). Any truth to this? Just curious.