Maple Lodge Farms is Canada’s largest independent chicken processor and I’ve been to the slaughter plant in Brampton, Ontario. With all the Maple Leaf listeria stuff over the past eight months, Maple Lodge has been sorta quiet.

Until today.

Maple Lodge chief executive officer Michael Burrows unveiled a new high-pressure method of killing listeria and other bacteria in sliced luncheon meats after the package is sealed. The process applies water under extremely high pressure to the packaged product, has no adverse impact on the product itself, and has been approved by Health Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.

So Maple Leaf, using that newfangled blogging technology, responded by saying Maple Leaf Foods was an early adopter of Ultra High Pressure (UHP) technology in Canada and began using it in Maple Leaf Simply Fresh entree products when they were introduced more than two years ago, in a bunch of other products, and will look at using it in deli meat if it can provide added food safety assurance to consumers.

Maple Leaf, seriously, you need better writers.

But this is what I like about the Maple Lodge approach:

They came out and said internal research showed consumer demand for higher levels of food safety has risen sharply in the past year, and that consumers would be willing to pay a premium of 1-2 cents per 100 grams of product to get it.

Maybe, consumers will say anything on a survey but vote with their money at checkout.

But Maple Lodge is going to label the stuff with a" SafeSure" sticker and market food safety at retail.

Good for them. Rather than lecturing consumers, let them choose. At checkout.