The USDA’s Federal Purchase Program buys meat for the National School Lunch program and for other Federal food nutrition programs. Those starting raw commodities (no inventory cost to meat plants $) are mostly contracted by school districts to be made into convenience oriented cafeteria end-items. Fat content can be lowered, and the tonnage produced increased via the liberal addition of water. Soy grits (which retain about 3 times their weight in water) are routinely used by further processors in precooked patty items, but can also be used in some precooked bagged items (for example: taco filling can be formulated at 35% hydrated soy). Small amounts of salt and sodium phosphate also increase finished meat product moisture retention. Significantly, further processors are paid based upon the number of finished item cases produced. Therefore, the freezer storing & shipping of fully hydrated (and then some) items is very lucrative. “The fastest way to get rich in the food business is to sell as much water as possible.” Understandably, beverage companies sell the most water. Boilable bags of meat containing products are eventually reheated, cut open with a knife and dumped into serving line steam table pans. The bags are petroleum based products. Whether or not soupy products are widely consumed by school children does not matter. Trendy perception is everything. And, these low calorie, low salt meat containing school lunch items are produced & distributed in high volume. That all sounds very good. Plying school district food buyers with their regional professional sports team’s game tickets is far from being unheard of. However, using some profits to purchase National Political Influence appears to be the most effective business practice for the big USDA donated meats further processing players.
” Condensed soup (invented in 1897 by John T. Dorrance, a chemist with Campbell’s Soup Company) allows soup to be packaged into a smaller can and sold at a lower price than other canned soups. The soup is usually doubled in volume by adding a can full of water or milk.” That was back during a more pragmatic era of prudent personal & fiscal spending.
Today, convenience of foodservice prep is all important; with extra packaging materials, increased product storage cost, increased shipping cost and the resulting increased fossil fuel usage all being of no consideration whatsoever. There currently exist a strong economic incentive to push out as much tonnage as this taxpayer paid for (includes Federal, State and Local taxes) market will bear.
Perhaps you could expand on this with examples. That govt food is not high quality I get.
The starting raw donated meat is high quality. Further processing for convenience of final preparation and/or for trending nutritional end-product attributes creates a great opportunity for some meat companies to make a lot of profit via selling fully diluted (not condensed) soup and sauce items.