Do food safety certifications improve the safety of our food system? evidence from the U.S. Meat, Poultry, and egg industry

• We examine whether private food safety certifications make the food system safer for meat, poultry, and egg industries in the United States. • We apply the penalized maximum likelihood method to address the rare event and separation issues in the dataset. • British Retail Consortium (BRC) certification lowers the probability of testing positive for Salmonella and Campylobacter by 0.3 and 2 percent, respectively. • Safe Quality Food (SQF) certification decreases the probability of testing positive for Campylobacter and Listeria by 1% and 0.4%, respectively. • Our results provide justification for firms to adopt certifications and for governments to use certifications to augment and supplement government food safety regulation efforts. Private food safety certifications have become increasingly popular in the global agri-food supply chain over the last three decades. We examine a fundamental yet unaddressed question of whether food safety certifications make our food system safer. Focusing on the U.S. processing industry for meat, poultry, and eggs, the most likely contaminated foods, we matched unique establishment-level food safety certification data collected over the period of 2015–2018 with the microbial testing data from the government for processing establishments. By applying a penalized maximum likelihood method to address the rare event problem in the data, we found that the certification to the British Retail Consortium food safety standard leads to a decrease in the probability of testing positive for Salmonella and Campylobacter by 0.3 and two percent, respectively, and the certification to Safe Quality Food standard leads to a decrease in the probability of testing positive for Campylobacter and Listeria by one and 0.4 percent, respectively. Our results provide justification for firms to adopt certifications and for governments to use certifications to augment and supplement government food safety regulation efforts.