USDA SETS TRADE DESCRIPTIONS FOR POULTRY

USDA SETS TRADE DESCRIPTIONS FOR POULTRY    The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agriculture Marketing Service (AMS) has published voluntary trade standards for ready-to-cook chicken products to be traded domestically and internationally.
   The U.S. Trade Descriptions for Poultry are intended to help wholesale trading of poultry by providing tools to better communicate product and packaging requirements among buyers and sellers.
   While AMS maintains voluntary standards that define quality grade levels for poultry products by limiting or excluding product defects, the trade description standards define poultry product characteristics such as parts of the bird, whether bone and skin are present, and how the product is packaged and packed.
   The standards for ready-to-cook chicken cover more than 70 chicken product systems and define a numeric coding system to communicate characteristics of the products to be traded.
   AMS will develop trade descriptions for all commodity traded poultry products.
   Comments on the descriptions are due by April 23. The rules may be viewed on the Web at https://www.ams.usda.gov/poultry/regulations/rulemaking/index.htm. For information, phone (202) 720-3506.