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National Advisory Committee on Meat and Poultry Inspection

January 7 – 8, 2014

Washington, DC

Subcommittee on 

FSIS Establishment-Specific Data Release Strategic Plan 

Report and Recommendations

1. How would the Committee recommend the Food Safety and Inspection Service

(FSIS) prioritize the list of datasets to be released?

FSIS should publish a demographics data set for all plants which would include 

information such as plant size, species, type of operation, etc. This data set will be 

important for users to correlate with other data sets the agency releases. FSIS should 

begin releasing data with its sampling data and prioritize sampling programs for 

pathogens that are considered adulterants (such as Ready-To-Eat (RTE) and ShigaToxin E. coli (STEC) programs). FSIS should also prioritize the release of 

establishment specific data for data sets which FSIS already publishes in 

summary/aggregated form. Another data set that could be released early is binary data 

on establishments describing whether certain tasks are performed or not, whether 

FSAs are performed, etc. 

The Committee encourages FSIS to release data sets in as timely a manner as possible 

and to release data sets on a regular basis. The Committee encourages FSIS to ensure 

the integrity of the data prior to release. The Committee would like FSIS to update the 

Committee annually about its progress on data release generally. 

2. Are there datasets that are not included on the list that should be considered?

FSIS should consider other data sets including a demographics data set for all plants; 

humane handling violations; inspection and enforcement data; binary data describing 

whether certain inspection tasks are performed or not, whether Food Safety 

Assessments (FSAs) are performed and why, etc.

Additional data sets which may not be establishment specific but would be important 

for public health include: Pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) patterns on all 

positive samples and data on the distribution of positive samples/serotypes including 

the month the sample was collected, the region of the country the sample was taken, 

etc. 
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3. How would the Committee rank/group the evaluation criteria? Are there any 

additional criteria that we should consider?

The Committee thought that FSIS’ list of criteria was a good list. The Committee did 

not recommend ranking or weighting the criteria because FSIS would have to look at 

all the criteria on a case by case basis with each data set. However if FSIS changes 

the criteria the agency should update stakeholders about the change and explain why 

the change was made. 

The Committee agreed that data that contains Personally Identifiable Information 

(PII) for FSIS personnel and data that contains corporate proprietary information 

should not be released. The Committee suggested a few changes to the criteria: 

• The potential impact to industry should be a separate consideration from 

whether the data contains corporate proprietary information.

• #4 should consider the costs to release and maintain the data. 

• The public health impact should be its own criteria rather than a subset of #5.

• #6 should be reworded to focus on how complicated the description of the data 

may be.

The Committee recommended that FSIS should routinely evaluate which data sets are

being used to understand how stakeholders are using the data and which data sets are 

most valuable to stakeholders. The Committee urges FSIS to consider how to address 

changes in sampling programs and to be clear with stakeholders when sampling 

programs are changed which can impact the comparability of the data.