Quality food: Send an SMS for meat quality assurance

Livestock Dept to launch text service for ensuring sale of quality meat.

LAHORE: The Livestock Department is going to introduce a new text message service to ensure the provision of healthy meat to consumers, The Express Tribune has learnt.

The announcement comes after authorities discovered several butchers selling unhygienic meat.

A Livestock Department official, requesting anonymity because he is not authorised to talk to the media, said each animal carcass leaving the slaughter houses would be assigned a unique number. “The butchers will have to display the tag number at their shops. Before buying meat, customers can text the number to the Livestock Department to verify whether the meat is hygienic or not,” the official said.



He said the department would respond with the kind of animal, date and place of slaughter, name of the butcher and expiry date for the meat.

“Butchers operating from slaughter houses across Punjab are registered with the Livestock Department. They are allotted a specific number of animals for slaughter. The officials at the slaughter houses will text the number of animals to be slaughtered by a specific butcher to the livestock department’s database and will get a virtual system-generated code for each carcass,” the official said.

He added that the system-generated numbers would be unique. “The tag number will be automatically deleted with the expiry of the meat. If an expired code is sent for verification, consumers will receive a message in Urdu, stating that the code sent is unauthentic and the meat is unfit for consumption,” the official said. Talking to The Express Tribune, Livestock Department Secretary Naseem Sadiq said the new system would be launched within 10 days. “The system will help reduce sale and consumption of unhealthy meat,” he said.

“It will also become easier for us to track butchers who sell unhygienic meat. The system will be launched initially in Lahore as a pilot project. More than 80 per cent of the total meat sold in the province is consumed in Lahore,” he said.

Sadiq said that the department was in contact with the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority with regard to the system.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 1^st, 2014.