New standards for raw meat products in South Africa, including the difference between a ‘value’ and ‘economy’ burger

The Department of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development has gazetted new standards for certain raw meat products in South Africa, including detailed breakdowns for what favourites like burger patties and boerewors can contain.

The new regulations apply to classes of raw processed meat products for sale in the country, including minced meat, raw flavoured meat, boerewors, various raw meat sausages, and burger patties.

They do not apply to canned meat products, processed meat products or meat analogue products or non-meat-based products that are processed to appear like raw processed meat products (ie, vegan or vegetarian type processed products).

They also clearly define what common terms like “lean”, “extra lean” or “regular” mean when it comes to the fat content within these products.

As a general note, extra lean meat – also called extra trim, trimmed fat or anything similar – has an analysed fat content of less than 5%. Lean or trim meat has a fat content of between 5% and 10%, and regular meat has a fat content of between 10% and 30%.

The new guidelines extend to the additional products that these meat products may or may not contain.

Know your value burger from an econo burger

The regulations define four kinds of burger patties: ground, regular, value, and economy.

• Ground burger patties are the ‘meatiest’ class, requiring a minimum total meat content of 99.6%, with no other edible offal added ingredients allowed. Any labels of lean or extra lean need to follow the fat content guidelines mentioned above.

• Regular burger patties have to contain at least 70% meat, with no other ingredients added except for cereals or starch, vinegar, spices and herbs, food additives or water. This class is not allowed to have “mechanically recovered” meat, colourants or vegetable proteins to bulk up the product.

• Value burger patties drop the raw meat requirement to a minimum of 55%, but still requires a meat equivalent to boost it up to 60%. This class allows edible offal and mechanically recovered meat to be added in, as well as colourants and other foodstuffs.

• Economy burger patties drop the raw meat requirement to 35%, with a meat equivalent boost to 55%. The rest can be filled with other foodstuffs.

Mechanically recovered meat is a paste-like meat product produced by forcing pureed or ground raw meats under high pressure through a sieve or similar device to separate the bone from the edible meat tissue. It is most closely associated with sausages and polony and the like.

According to the department, if any burger patty is marketed as coming from a specific species or animal, it must have a 70% meat content, three-quarters of which have to come from that species.

The regulations also specify the requirements for other raw meat products. Boerewors, for example, has to be 90% meat with a fat content lower than 30%. It generally follows the same guidelines as regular beef patties.

One of the key aspects of the regulations is how these raw meat products are sold, with specifications for how they are packaged, labelled or displayed by retailers.

Notably, they enforce stricter guidelines for how products are named. If meat products contain two or more species in the mix, they can no longer simply say “mixed-species” and have to list the specific species in descending order of mass.

If a product is a single species product and uses offal, the product must indicate exactly what offal is used, i.e. liver, heart, etc. Failing this, the product must then have “offal” as part of its name – indicated in the same size as the main ingredient (eg, ‘Beef and offal patty’).

Similar guidelines are in place for flavoured meats. Where flavouring or foodstuffs have been added to the meat to give a distinctive flavour, that ingredient needs to be a part of the name (eg, ‘Chilli mutton sausage’).

The regulations are embedded below:

Read: Woolworths, Checkers and other stores to offer more ‘wild’ meat as South Africa introduces new laws