Fact Sheet: Benefits of Rinse and Chill
Rinse & Chill®: Produces Safer, Better Tasting Meat
Our clients, further processors, food retailers and consumers all benefit from Rinse & Chill®.
Our clients benefit from knowing that the product leaving their facilities meets the highest standards possible for quality, safety and, ultimately, taste. They can sell with the confidence that their product is unsurpassed in the industry in terms of microbial safety, cleanliness, appearance and wholesomeness. Consistent meat quality also better meets consumer expectations. This makes Rinse & Chill both a reputation-builder and a profit-maker. Rinse & Chill helps to create a preference for our clients’ product. That drives brands, sales and revenues. Most of our clients have reported that meat from Rinse & Chill carcasses is more easily separated from the bone, which improves both ergonomics and yields.
Retailers benefit from offering a superior product to consumers. Rinse & Chill processed meat looks better in the meat case. The meat is cleaner, there is less blood and better color. The bright red muscle meat and clean white fat provides an outstanding, distinctive visual appeal and generates great opportunities for branded, case-ready beef. In fact, Rinse & Chill® meat products are now used across the USA, Canada and Australia as well as in importing nations. All the major QSR’s in the US currently use rinsed product in their grinds. Most major retailers sell or have sold these products as well as bison, lamb, grass fed and grain fed beef.
Of course, the most important beneficiary of Rinse & Chill is the consumer. Consumers regularly list beef tenderness and safety as paramount issues of concern, in addition to affordability. Inconsistent tenderness and palatability has been identified as one of beef’s key problems with consumers. Rinse & Chill® improves tenderness substantially, palatability, and data shows it reduces tenderness variability (WBSF data). Flavor improvement in certain types of animals, cuts and grades is an important benefit too, particularly meats that tend to retain blood with sex-linked or blood borne flavor taint compounds, like male bison, mutton, pork and some grass fed beef.
By removing blood immediately and more thoroughly from the carcass, Rinse & Chill reduces one form of iron found in blood (not the heme iron) that is a pro-oxidant and has a deleterious impact on flavor. This is not to be confused with the form of heme iron found in muscle, which is unaffected, so overall nutritional content is substantially unchanged.
In taste tests with discriminating chefs at fine restaurants, Rinse & Chill consistently elevates the palatability of the meat. Colorado Chef Victor Matthews even ran a “beef challenge” over a two-year period at his Black Bear Restaurant to challenge this assertion. The results – Rinse & Chill voted the “World’s Best Beef.” And if you noticed that the eating quality of your burger at your favorite fast food restaurant has improved in the past few years, we’d like to think we had something to do with that.