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Producer and Processor

CDFA plays both a regulatory and advisory role to producers and processors of meat, eggs, dairy products, and produce.

Regulatory Roles:

Meat and Poultry Inspection Programs license and inspect meat and poultry establishments in California that are exempt from federal inspection. The Programs also license and regulate the production of pet food, rendering, and inedible kitchen grease, and movement and disposal of animals that are not fit for human consumption.

Animal Health Programs detect and control animal illness and zoonotic diseases (those illnesses that can be transmitted from animals to man) through surveillance and monitoring programs.

Milk and Dairy Food Safety Programs license and inspect milk and dairy food producers and processors. They regulate milk quality and safety by addressing physical, chemical, and biological hazards in milk, dairy foods, and dairy-like foods.

The Inspection Service Programs and Center for Analytical Chemistry ensure that fruits, vegetables, dairy products, animal feed, fertilizer, and livestock drugs are safe, effective, and meet the quality guaranteed by the manufacturer through licensing, registration, inspection, sampling, and laboratory testing. Any fruit, vegetable, dairy product, animal feed, fertilizer, or drug found to be contaminated, deficient in quality, or harmful to plants, animals, humans, or the environment, is withheld from distribution and use.

Advisory roles:

The Animal and Plant Production Food Safety Programs work directly with the State's agricultural trade groups and associations as well as individual producers, processors, and shippers of fresh produce and animal products to promote development and implementation of voluntary on-farm quality assurance programs. Program efforts focus on outreach and education programs as well as partnerships with other regulatory agencies and producers to develop effective on-farm prevention and control strategies.

The Marketing Branch oversees the State's 51 marketing programs, which provide an organizational structure, with governmental oversight, for agricultural producers and handlers that allows them to collectively solve production and marketing problems that they could not effectively address individually.