How Can CAS Certification Become a Shield for Food Hooligans?
"Don't let CAS become a talisman for food scoundrels!" It is hard to imagine these words coming from Yang Po-yuan, vice chairman of Sing Kung Industrial, a company that has itself passed CAS certification and is a model in Taiwan, China's pork cutting and processing industry.
Yang Po-yuan, known as "Dr. Yang," once studied medicine in Japan. After returning to Taiwan, China, he applied basic clinical medical knowledge and hospital medical record management systems to live pig raising, slaughtering and processing, and combined them with concepts such as traceability, infection control, disease prevention, hazard control and animal welfare in his meat business operations.
Because "Dr. Yang" is extremely meticulous about quality control, not only has Sing Kung won CAS (Taiwan, China's premium agricultural product certification system) top-level "excellent" certification on its own for consecutive years, but even Japanese visitors with strict requirements for ingredient quality, after touring the Sing Kung factory, admitted they could not compare. As a result, after Taiwan, China's pigs saw an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in March 1997 that interrupted exports, Sing Kung became the first heat-processing plant to resume meat exports to Japan.
In the fields of pork slaughtering, cutting and meat processing, Sing Kung has long obtained CAS excellent-level certification, and "Dr. Yang," speaking about the recent domestic outbreak of lean meat powder residues in meat products, repeatedly emphasized the importance of establishing "traceability" in the livestock industry and food processing industry. He said that only with traceability and implementation of origin labeling can consumers have choices. He also criticized the current poor management of CAS certification, and said that the Government Procurement Act has caused vicious price-cutting, turning the domestic meat market into a situation of "bad money driving out good," making it even harder for businesses that implement traceability to survive.
The following is a summary of the interview conducted by NewsMarket reporters with "Dr. Yang" (photo provided by Sing Kung):
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