Marshfield Food Safety (MFS) has opened a new lab for food testing in Springdale, AR. The lab specializes in providing reliable food process evaluation.

“We had a client who needed a solution for testing and placing a lab onsite was the answer.  Doing so is also good for MFS as it lets us evaluate a new market area,” says Marshfield Food Safety CEO Roy Radcliff, Ph.D. “We currently provide testing for them in beef and are now moving into testing turkey for them.”

The Springdale lab employs six people and Radcliff hopes to expand microbial and pathogen testing to other clients in that area in the near future. The temporary facility tested its first samples on March 30 in Arkansas’s fourth-largest city.

Arkansas ranked third in the U.S. in 2012 in turkey production with more than eight million birds, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Agricultural Statistics Service.  

Springdale is a hub for turkey production as two major companies process turkey in the city.  This is the Marshfield Food Safety’s second foray into turkey. The company performs about one million pathogen and microbiological tests at 12 labs across the U.S. and Canada.