Our data sources and methodology

Where our inspection data comes from, how current it is, and what it does and does not tell you. If a listing on this site shows an inspection badge, this page explains exactly what was checked and against what.

The source

Inspection badges come from the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) Meat, Poultry and Egg Product Inspection Directory — the federal register of establishments operating under a USDA grant of inspection — together with its Establishment Demographic Data supplement, which records which species an establishment slaughters and whether it also operates under a custom-exempt arrangement.

Some states run their own meat inspection programme, and establishments inspected under a state programme do not appear in the federal directory at all. Where a state publishes its register, we use it as a second source:

  • Dataset: Texas Department of State Health Services, Establishments by Grant Type (Meat Safety Assurance)
  • Edition used: 30 January 2026
  • Covers: full state inspection, voluntary inspection and custom exemptions
  • Kansas: Kansas Department of Agriculture, Inspected Slaughter and Processing Plants and Custom Slaughter and Processing Plants lists — report date 12 June 2026.
  • Minnesota: Minnesota Department of Agriculture, Minnesota State “Equal To” Plants and Custom Exempt Meat & Poultry Processing Plants — published as web tables and updated weekly; retrieved 12 August 2026.
  • Missouri: Missouri Department of Agriculture, Meat and Poultry Inspection Programme facility map, which marks inspected and custom-exempt plants — retrieved 12 August 2026.
  • Iowa: Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship meat and poultry licensing list — retrieved 12 August 2026.

Iowa publishes a plant-class code rather than the words “state inspected” or “custom exempt”. We did not guess at what the codes mean: we cross-checked every class against the federal directory. The classes beginning with F matched federally inspected establishments 90–97% of the time, and none of the remaining 148 records appeared in the federal directory at all. That separation is what the Iowa badges rest on.

What the badge means

A badge reading USDA-inspected means the establishment appears in the current FSIS directory under a federal grant of inspection. Where the badge adds slaughter, FSIS records the establishment as carrying out slaughter rather than processing alone. Where it adds custom-exempt available, FSIS records a custom exemption alongside the federal grant.

A separate badge reading Texas state-inspected, voluntary inspection or custom-exempt available comes from the Texas register. Federal and state badges are shown separately and never merged: an establishment inspected by Texas is not USDA-inspected, and some hold both. Where a business appears under more than one grant type, the badge lists each.

USDA-inspected, state-inspected and custom-exempt

  • Federally (USDA) inspected — operates under an FSIS grant of inspection. Product from these plants may generally be sold across state lines.
  • State-inspected — operates under a state meat and poultry inspection program. Federal law requires such programs to be at least equal to the federal one, and product is generally sold within that state. These establishments do not appear in the federal directory at all; where we have the state register, as in Texas, they carry a state badge instead.
  • Custom-exempt — slaughters or processes animals for the owner’s own use. The meat is not sold; it is marked “Not For Sale”. This is the arrangement most people use when they have their own animal, or a share of one, processed.

For the authoritative definitions and the current rules, see FSIS directly. We describe what the dataset records; we do not interpret regulation on their behalf.

Coverage — what is and is not verified

This is a work in progress and we would rather be straight about its limits than imply more than we have done.

  • 1,594 listings currently carry a verified inspection badge. 546 carry a federal (USDA FSIS) badge across ten states — Pennsylvania, Texas, New York, Minnesota, Missouri, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa and Idaho — and 1,061 carry a state badge, of which 13 hold both.
  • State registers are in place for Texas, Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota and Iowa. Colorado, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, New York and Idaho have no state programme — in those states the federal directory is the complete register of inspected plants.
  • Every plant in those five registers now has a listing — state-inspected and custom-exempt alike. We added 710 establishments from the Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota and Iowa registers that were not previously on the site. Each was created from the register record alone — name, address, phone and inspection status — with no description written for it.
  • Most of what we added is custom-exempt, and that matters. A custom-exempt plant processes livestock for the animal’s owner: the meat is marked “not for sale” and cannot legally be sold to you. It is where you take your own animal, not somewhere you buy meat. Every custom-exempt listing says so on the page.
  • Most listings on this site have no badge, and that is not a mark against them. The federal directory only covers federally inspected establishments. A great many good custom and state-inspected butchers are simply not in it. An absent badge means “not found in the federal directory”, not “not inspected”.
  • Species information reflects what FSIS records for slaughter at that establishment. It is not a menu of services, and it will not always match what a plant will actually take this season.

Iowa is a special case. Its register publishes a town and a phone number but no street address at all, so every Iowa listing added from it is placed at the centre of its town and labelled as approximate. The address line on those listings is the town, not a street — ring ahead before driving.

Map locations

The federal directory publishes coordinates; the Texas state register does not. For Texas state-sourced listings we geocode the published street address — first through the US Census Bureau geocoder, then through OpenStreetMap for addresses the Census could not resolve. Every result is checked against the state boundary and the city we hold before it is used.

Some rural addresses — farm-to-market roads, county routes — cannot be resolved to a building. Those pins are placed at the town instead, and the listing says so explicitly: “Map location is approximate.” Where you see that, trust the written address over the pin.

How we match records

Federal records are matched to our listings by business name within the same city and state. Names are normalised (punctuation and company suffixes such as LLC or Inc. removed) and compared with a character-level similarity measure; only pairs above a set threshold are accepted, and the threshold was chosen by reviewing samples by hand rather than taking whatever the algorithm offered. Matching by name is imperfect: businesses change hands, trade under different names, and appear in the federal register under a parent company.

Corrections

If a badge on your business is wrong, tell us and we will fix it. That includes a badge on the wrong business, an establishment number that is not yours, species that do not reflect what you do, or a missing badge on a plant that is federally inspected. Use our contact page and include the listing URL.

Inspection status is a regulatory matter and it changes. Always confirm current status with the establishment or with FSIS before relying on it for a commercial decision.