Why your ground beef is not required to name a country

For nearly seven years, American grocery stores were legally required to tell you where the beef came from.

The rule was called country of origin labeling, COOL for short. USDA published the final rule for all covered commodities on January 15, 2009, and it took effect on March 16, 2009. Covered commodities included muscle cuts of beef and veal, lamb, chicken, goat and pork, plus ground beef, ground lamb, ground chicken, ground goat and ground pork, wild and farm raised fish and shellfish, fresh produce, macadamia nuts, pecans, ginseng and peanuts. If you bought a steak, the store had to name the country.

Canada and Mexico took the United States to the World Trade Organization over it and won. On December 7, 2015, WTO arbitrators set the maximum permitted retaliation at 1.05 billion Canadian dollars a year for Canada and 228 million U.S. dollars a year for Mexico. On December 21, the WTO authorized both countries to retaliate.

Congress settled it in the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2016, which amended the law to take beef and pork out. USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service published the conforming rule on March 2, 2016. The operative sentence is short, and it is the reason your freezer looks the way it does.

Notice how narrow that is. Lamb, chicken, goat, and wild and farm raised fish and shellfish stayed on the list. They still have to name a country at the retail counter. Beef and pork walked out of the room, and they are the two you buy the most of.

• March 16, 2009Mandatory country of origin labeling takes effect. Beef and pork are covered.
• December 7, 2015WTO arbitrators set retaliation at 1.05 billion Canadian dollars for Canada and 228 million U.S. dollars for Mexico, per year.
• March 2, 2016Beef and pork are removed from mandatory country of origin labeling. Lamb, chicken, goat, fish and shellfish stay in.
• March 18, 2024USDA publishes a new federal definition of the words “Product of USA” on meat.
• January 1, 2026That definition becomes enforceable. Using it stays voluntary.

Here is the part most people find hard to believe, so it is worth quoting the government on itself. Until the end of last year, the phrase “Product of USA” on a meat package had no requirement attached to where the animal came from. It only required that something had happened to the meat here.

The same document explains the mechanism plainly: imported meat that is repackaged or reprocessed in an inspected plant here is “deemed and treated as domestic product for labeling purposes.” A carton crosses a border, a plant opens it, and on the other side of the room it is domestic.

USDA fixed that. It commissioned a consumer survey, found that most shoppers already believed the phrase meant the animal was born, raised, slaughtered and processed here, and wrote that belief into the regulation. The final rule published on March 18, 2024. Establishments had until January 1, 2026 to comply. Since that date, on a single ingredient product, the words mean exactly what you thought they meant all along.

Good rule. Long overdue. And it comes with a catch that decides everything else on this page.

So the strong sentence is now honest, and printing it is a choice. A company that can say it, says it. A company that cannot, says nothing, and saying nothing has never been against any rule.

One more thing worth knowing, because people misread it constantly: the USDA mark of inspection is a statement about the plant, not about the animal. Imported meat repackaged or reprocessed in an inspected facility here is, in USDA's own phrasing, “deemed and treated as domestic product for labeling purposes.” The mark tells you the plant was inspected. It does not tell you where the animal lived.

None of this would matter much if American beef were a closed loop. It is not. The United States is simultaneously one of the largest beef exporters on earth and, in USDA's own words, “the second largest importer, a majority of which is destined for blending into ground beef.”

Both figures come from USDA's Economic Research Service. And they are not a scandal either. Lean imported trimmings exist because of arithmetic, not conspiracy, which is the next section. But it does mean that in any given week a very large volume of beef is moving into American plants, and no rule obliges the package at the end of that line to mention it.

Where it comes from, by share of U.S. beef imports:

• Australia24%

• Canada22%

• Brazil15%

• Mexico13%

• New Zealand12%

Shares of total U.S. beef imports in 2022. Source: USDA Economic Research Service, Cattle & Beef Sector at a Glance.

That Brazilian share has a story behind it. The United States lifted its ban on fresh Brazilian beef in February 2020, and USDA notes that imports from Brazil have since “grown more than four times.” None of it is illegal. All of it is invisible at the shelf.

Here is the part that explains the volume, and it is worth understanding because it is the honest answer to “why would anyone import beef into cattle country.”

Ground beef is a blend, and it has to be. Fat percentage is the whole product. Trimmings from older cows run very lean, around 90 percent. Trimmings from grain finished heifers and steers run fatty, around 50 percent. You mix them to land on the number printed on the package.

So the imported lean is not a trick. It is a shortage being filled. The trick, if there is one anywhere in this story, is only that the finished package does not have to mention any of it.

Put the three facts side by side and the conclusion writes itself.

One: for beef and pork, nobody at the store owes you a country. Two: the phrase that would tell you is now trustworthy, and printing it is entirely optional. Three: several billion pounds a year are moving through the system, mostly into ground beef.

Which means the label is no longer where the answer lives. The answer lives with whoever is willing to put the claim on the front of the business, in public, where it can be checked and where being wrong would cost them everything.

That is not a hypothetical company. Good Ranchers has been running its advertising on one flat sentence, “100% U.S. sourced meat,” since long before USDA got around to defining the words.

The company was started by Ben and Corley Spell, a couple who went looking for honest, quality food to feed their own growing family and did not find it. Their words on their own About page, not ours:

Seafood is wild caught rather than farmed. Across the whole catalog the company states no added hormones, no antibiotics, no seed oils, no fillers and no dyes. Every one of those sentences is published on goodranchers.com, which is the point of this section: they are checkable, and a company that prints them is choosing to be held to them.

The Ranchers Classic is the box the company started with and still sells the most of. It is a useful thing to look at because you can count it, unlike a claim.

It arrives the way frozen meat should: hand cut, vacuum sealed piece by piece, packed with dry ice in an insulated box, delivered frozen and ready to go straight into your freezer.

All four are published on goodranchers.com, where the company reports over 20,000 five star reviews.

Go back to the freezer with what you now know.

If the package names a country, good, it told you. If it says Product of USA or Made in the USA, that sentence now carries a federal definition and you can trust the four steps behind it. If it says prepared or packaged in the USA, that is a claim about one step in a plant, not about the animal. And if it says nothing at all, which is what most of them do, then nothing has gone wrong and nobody has broken a rule. You simply were never told, and you were never going to be.

That is the whole argument for buying meat from people who answer the question before you ask it.