The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Food & crafts => Food processing => Topic started by: Abode on March 25, 2020, 06:37:25 pm
-
Hi everybody,
Apologies if this is a repetition. However; I'm looking to sell meat boxes online and need help getting my head around the regulations.
I simply rear the animals and don't intend to slaughter or butcher them. My plan is to send them off to be slaughtered, butchered and Vac packed. I will then sell them via post frozen.
In theory I won't ever touch raw meat, because they will all be sealed in bags.
So my question is; what regulations etc. do I need to comply with? I tried to talk to my local council; but they were struggling a bit and now they're obviously a bit busy!
Cheers,
A
-
Others who know more about it will be along soon, I imagine, but from my small foray into this a few years ago..
There are regs about temperatures and so on, and freezing before selling is problematic because the rate of freezing in domestic freezers means that most of us would struggle to freeze several carcases down quickly enough, not to mention that if the packs come home before going out then you may have to demonstrate that you comply with food handling regs, max temperatures, etc.
So the option I went for, which worked well for me, was to get the boxes, labels, cool packaging and so on to the butcher, the butcher packed up, labelled and sealed the boxes, then the courier picked them up direct from there. Overnight carriage with next morning delivery keeps the meat cool enough (although I discovered that paying extra for "by 10 o'clock" did not achieve "by 10 o'clock" in all cases, due to the distances involved, so would go for "by noon" in future), then the customers can freeze things themselves.
-
Our butcher has a blast freezer which is much better than trying to freeze a cow in a domestic freezer.
Wife has a food hygiene certificate and we are registered with the council as a food business.
Thermometers are kept with the meat (both in transit home from the butchers and in storage in our freezers) and a record is kept to show that the meat has been stored at the right temperature.
Its very rare for us to post meat so I'm not sure if that involves anything extra.