USDA Noncompliance Records (NRs): What Every Meat Processor Should Know
By John Scanga, Ph.D and Brian McFarlane
In USDA-regulated facilities, noncompliance records (NRs) are a part of life—but that doesn’t mean they have to be routine. Whether you're a plant manager, food safety specialist, or QA leader, understanding how to minimize, manage, and respond to NRs is critical to maintaining compliance and protecting your brand. While perfection is the ideal, preparation and proactive practices are the key to reducing the frequency and severity of regulatory findings. This article explores practical strategies for preventing NRs, how to effectively respond when one is issued, and why maintaining open communication with inspectors can make all the difference.
What are some of the best ways to prevent NRs from being written?
The best approach that you can take to minimize or reduce the likelihood that you are going to get a noncompliance record from the agency is, in essence, be perfect. You should operate under the expectation that you are going to get one. If you operate under inspection, it’s inevitable.
The thing that we can do as food safety practitioners, quality managers, and plant managers to reduce the frequency of NRs or the severity of the NRs is twofold –
1. Have a sound food safety plan and execute that plan doing the things that you say you're going to do, routinely and effectively.
You have a food safety program, a HACCP program, and that ties into food safety culture and ownership of your program. You should be the one leading what that expectation is and leading the challenge of your internal organization to not only meet your program but exceed it. The goal shouldn't be to just minimally skim by how your program is defined. We all produce products that people eat and consume, so we all have the same goal and that's to have high quality product that is safe and there should never be a shortage of challenging yourself and challenging your programs to make them better.
2. Have a really good, open communication channel with your inspectors.
There's a lot of things that you can work through with routine communication, including the day-to-day things that are going to happen. For example, if you walk into pre-op with an inspector and something didn't get cleaned 100%, there's a little bit of visible residue on a surface, but you haven't started operations yet, technically if you've allowed the agency onto the floor then they can write you a NR for that. If you have a good relationship with them, it's minor, and chances are they're going to let you address that without formally documenting it. Obviously, if you have a CCP violation or something that's more egregious or larger in scope than that, you're likely going to get an NR for it, as you should.
Additionally, utilize your weekly meetings and the meeting notes that you do with USDA each week and be very open with them and ask them for input. Say “hey, have you guys seen things that maybe you don't like the looks of or that could be improved?”. As they see you asking for input, especially if you take that input and utilize it, it will only polish that relationship that you have with them. As that relationship builds and grows, it will inevitably make the whole system better, resulting in fewer NRs for you as well.
What are some best practices that you can do when you get an NR?
1. Review and confirm the NR
You need to read the NR very critically, down to the individual words that are used, because it is a documented piece of evidence. Therefore, it is important to make sure what is written in the NR is accurate, precise, and true in what it was written for. This includes simple errors, such as grammatical changes.
The first step is to pull the regulatory citations to make sure you understand what regulation you violated and what authority that they're handing this NR to you for. That also helps you respond to it. If they've cited the wrong regulation and you don't correct that, it could turn into a bigger problem down the road if they start associating things to that NR or linking NRs.
2. Review your process
After the NR is reviewed and confirmed, your investigation needs to start immediately to determine if this did occur or not and ensure that all the facts are gathered, even if it's a small NR.
Don't be afraid to admit, “Yep, we screwed it up”, but you still want it to be accurate for how you screwed up and whatever that process was.
3. Identify and implement corrective actions
If you've determined that you are in fact at fault and that the NR is accurate, then you put good corrective actions to it and respond to it and utilize that to make yourself better. Good and effective corrective actions are one consistent thing that plants struggle with.
Don't necessarily look at it as if they're just picking on me if you truly did something wrong. Admit it and make your system better and utilize it for improvement.
How would you challenge a NR?
If you have a good, working relationship with your frontline inspector, it's not really a challenge; it's a conversation. Start by questioning whether the NR has the correct regulatory citation and observation, and whether it can be worked through.
When it comes to a challenge, if they do site the wrong regulatory citation, it invalidates the NR per the regulation, and you can throw it out on a technicality. If the NR is wrong otherwise, and you believe you met your HACCP plan and the product wasn't injurious, a challenge should be done very objectively with facts and data, keeping emotion out of it, and it should be executed through a chain of command, starting with the inspector that wrote it, up to their supervisor, and so on as needed.
An inspector might believe that your HACCP plan is incorrect, and so they write you an NR because they want you to do it a different way. But if your HACCP plan is written and you're enacting your process flow according to the plan, that's a good way to challenge that NR with the supporting documentation of your plan that you have in place.
Is it useful having an external expert opinion when challenging an NR?
Don’t be afraid to utilize your resources. Bring in a supplier expert or somebody from academia that has expertise in a particular area, HACCP experts, antimicrobial experts and/or food safety microbiologist experts, as applicable. A lot of companies have scientific advisory boards that should be used as well.
You may not necessarily quote them in your response to the NR, but, yes, utilize the information, and allow them to help coach and guide you on how to respond.
What should be done if the reply deadline on an NR is quickly coming and you don't think you'll have the true corrective action finished?
From a true technical regulatory perspective there's not really regulatory deadlines, those deadlines are self-imposed. However, it is best practice to set a timeline around completing a corrective action and to communicate any delays or issues.
When you set those deadlines, make sure that you can hold your team accountable, yourself accountable, and FSIS accountable for outcomes. Every NR is going to have a different time scope and a different level of corrective action, so if you have one that requires capital improvements or capital construction that can stay open for an extremely long period of time until the corrective action is completed, use that time to set achievable deadlines.
If you're waiting for a piece of equipment and suddenly, we have a winter storm and it's going to be a week late and you're now not going to meet your deadline, reach out and inform your inspector of the delay and demonstrate that you are proactively working on it.
What if you put a set of corrective actions in place and you just fail to implement those corrective actions; how do you approach FSIS to convince them that the issue is fixed?
This comes down to intent. Was there a true attempt to fix the corrective action or was it dismissive, a half attempt at doing something to “get this piece of paper off my desk as quickly as possible”?
Often finding the root cause may be impossible to put your finger on, and so implementing a corrective action is very challenging. There may also be times when corrective actions are attempted and fail miserably. But if an attempt was made to perform a good, thorough investigation, and the intent was there in trying to do the right thing even though you missed the mark and you are going back to adjust programs and modify corrective actions as needed, that shows a desire to be better and a willingness to honestly fix the issue.
What are some considerations if the agency decides to escalate a problem, or you are not seeing progress being made?
First and foremost, if the USDA is escalating an issue, you need to determine if you are wrong or if the NR has inaccuracies that need to be corrected. Don't be afraid to admit that you are wrong or that there is an issue in your plant that needs to be resolved and act immediately to initiate corrective actions.
It may be appropriate in some circumstances to escalate the issue yourself if progress is not being made by resolving an NR with your inspector. This might be the case if you are not getting the feedback you expect from the local inspector. You may find that you are wrong, but they just didn’t have the ability to explain it at the local level. Escalate it to have those discussions.
Conversely, you may have a situation where you are not getting any NRs. This could happen particularly in very small and medium-sized plants with a smaller organizational network and an inspector that may be limited a little bit in their technical scope. Or in the event that the inspector is lazy or complacent. What this can mean or lead to is a feeling that you are doing everything right and become complacent yourself and risk an NR when a different inspector or the next level of oversight comes along.
Don't be happy with good enough.
You must proactively try to find the risks, driving the team with focus and intent. If you do that internally, the whole discussion around NRs becomes pretty quiet.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, NRs are not just paperwork—they're a reflection of your food safety system's performance and your facility’s commitment to continuous improvement. Preventing NRs starts with robust programs, clear accountability, and a culture that values transparency and proactive problem-solving. When they do occur, treat NRs as learning opportunities: respond with precision, own the issue, and use expert guidance when needed. Whether you're reviewing your own facility or evaluating a supplier, don't settle for “good enough”—true food safety excellence comes from a mindset that anticipates risk, invites scrutiny, and always aims higher.
If you need some extra help along the way, let us be a resource for you.
