A friend, Dan Flynn, editor of Food Safety News, has been posting this week from Chile, one of my favorite places in the world.

He is attending and speaking on FSMA to the annual meeting of Chilealimentos A.G., a food and agricultural organization that supports the Chilean effort to become a major player in international food trade.

His postings from Talca means he is pretty close to San VIncente, Chile, the home of Super Pollo, a chicken processing company that began in 1974 and now accounts for 233,000 tons of poultry meat per year, nearly 55 percent of Chile’s total chicken production.

Super Pollo is just one company within a much larger company called Agrosuper SA. Agrosuper produces chicken, turkey, swine and salmon meats, much of it for exporting.

When I was the USDA undersecretary for food safety, I toured the Super Pollo plant in San VIncente as part of Chile’s effort to open up chicken exports to the United State.

I have never seen a cleaner plant.

I take that back, I have seen one plant in the U.S. that was cleaner but will write about that one in my next blog. It is a story in and of itself.

It turns out the original Super Pollo burned to the ground in 2006 and the company rebuilt using all the latest technologies. Visitors walk around the plant on suspended stainless steel walkways that prevent shoes from becoming covered with feathers and other slop. But the floors themselves appeared to me to be immaculately clean as were all the working parts.

And this level of cleanliness is possible in a plant that can kill and process up to 350,000 birds per day. It can do that because of size, automation and running two 8 hour shifts per day with a 4 hour cleaning between each shift.

What impressed me the most was the chilling process after birds were water stunned. They were first immersed for a relatively short trip, compared to the U.S. standards, in the water coolers, something not affectionately referred to in the United States as “fecal soup.” At Super Pollo they call it water cleansing.

The birds are then shackled and pass through an air cooling chamber where acidified water is sprayed on the birds both rinsing off and killing any bacteria left from the water cooling.

Before I knew anything about water vs. air chilling, I knew I liked the texture and flavor of a brand of chicken killed and processed in Nebraska near to where we lived. I assumed it had something to do with the proximity to our retail store. But after I became educated on chicken processing, I learned that my favorite brand was 100% air chilled, something not many American chicken products can claim to be.

Super Pollo rebuilt and got it right.

They also got to export chicken meat to the United States shortly after that visit (and at the same time, they opened up their ports to our chicken and beef products). In 2015 the United States imported $2.9 Billion in food products from Chile. They are becoming a major player.

Now, feel free to start speculating on what U.S. plant was the cleanest I ever visited.

Super Pollo; muy bueno

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