This article analyzes the economies of capacity use regarding hot water
decontamination to reduce postslaughter risk of pathogens in meat, taking
interfarm heterogeneities of Salmonella risk and costs of
transportation into account, using Denmark as a case study. If risk
reduction goals are stated at the processing plant level, then the
exploitation of the favorable cost-effectiveness properties of hot water
slaughtering requires fairly ambitious risk reduction goals and thus high
use of decontamination capacity. If instead risk reduction goals are
formulated for the sector as a whole, the cost-effectiveness properties can
be exploited even for relatively low-risk reduction goals.