Federal Agents
Any company that produces food products with meat in them, and crosses State lines must be subject to Federal Inspection. USDA inspectors wield a lot of power. They wear badges and are law enforcement officers.
Over the years, I have found that these people are fairly even-handed and reasonable with their requests.
It was my responsibility to stay on their good side as much as possible. Some of the companies with their authoritarian culture thought it best to be adversarial towards these authorities. Some of my bosses would bad mouth these people and do things just to make them mad. One USDA inspector, who was worthy of respect, told me he was torn between hammering our company for the stupid stuff our upper management was doing, but said he had to show mercy because I was so accommodating. I was grateful that he took out his wrath on someone else.
The USDA inspector assigned to me was partnered with a woman USDA inspector who was actually a former Marine Corps drill instructor. If she asked you a question, you better not quibble or obfuscate, or the hammer would be down.
These two eventually inflicted a major punishment down on the Company. It is called PEA (Progressive Enforcement Action) When PEA is in effect, you cannot run any product whatsoever with meat in it unless they are present. Plus there are often more of them assigned to the Company. The Company had to pay for the inspector's salaries. So if they all decide to leave for lunch or something, they can shut down the plant.
If someone chose to ignore that, they could come back and tell you to scrap everything you ran. It was not a happy situation. During this PEA, they told me it was okay for me to run without them around. I was pleased with that.
In other places I have run into tyrannical USDA inspectors. If you give someone that kind of power over others, sooner or later they will abuse it. This woman was bucking for some kind of promotion or something. She would not ever leave without finding at least one thing wrong. It was always some annoying regulation that cost money and did nothing to improve food quality. As far as food quality is concerned, the USDA should be the least of a food company's worries.
One time this woman inspector thought she got us on a regulation in her book. The regulation said that we "should" do something. This action made us scrap a bunch of product that was perfectly edible. It had something to do with an older label or something.
I found out about it after the damage was done. I didn't want her to get us again, so I reminded her that a "should" regulation was somewhat optional, unlike a "shall" regulation. She read it again and saw that I was right.
She clearly did not like being wrong. It was not long after that she found something to bitch about. I had someone put some broth in a tank on an off shift. Since we did that before her working hours, she tagged it, and it had to be scrapped. Plus she shut down the whole plant. 98% of the plant had nothing to do with it.
I got a phone call in the morning at home about it. I think we just scrapped the broth so she would remove the tag. All that for no reason. Everything was clean.
One of the companies also had the Commercial Division of the USDA there. All they did was ensure that our drained weights of our canned goods were correct. They were an optional service that we chose to have so we could put the USDA shield on the label.
I doubt if there was any marketing advantage to having that tiny 10mm shield on the label.
Our inspector on second shift, who we called "Ned the Fed", was a goof who lived three states away and commuted home every weekend. Sometimes he would overstep his authority and try to enforce things he had no jurisdiction over. We used to tell him that we needed to get rid of the shield from our products. He would always tell us how great the shield was for us. Overall, we got along fine with the guy.