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A new labeling rule that went into full effect Saturday requires meatpackers and retailers to provide consumers with more information about where their meat comes from.

The country-of-origin labeling mandate (COOL) forces retailers and meatpackers to detail where the livestock from which meat came was born, raised and slaughtered. It applies to certain cuts of beef, veal, chicken, pork, lamb and goat sold in the supermarket. Processed, deli and ground meats are exempt from the new rules.

Previously, labels on most packages of meat only had to list the countries the meat passed through. Now there will be more details. For example, a steak may have a label that states that the animal was born in Canada, raised in the U.S. and slaughtered in the U.S.

“The idea of COOL is to have greater delineation of the steps in the process, helping the consumer understand that it wasn’t necessarily grown all the way up to slaughter in another country and then brought here for slaughter,” said Bryon Wiegand, who teaches in the Meat Science department at the University of Missouri.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture issued the new labeling rules on May 23 and gave meatpackers six months to comply. The rules went in to full effect November 23.

If the new mandate stays on the books, most of the meat for sale in the supermarket will bear similar country-of-origin labels.

“The vast majority of red meats and processed meats that we’re going to see in a grocery store will be from the United States,” Wiegand said.

About 6 percent of our meat comes from livestock that has spent some part of its life abroad, according to Ron Plain, an agricultural economist at the University of Missouri. Some 14 percent of our beef, 8 percent of our pork and less than 1 percent of our poultry are from animals that were born, raised or slaughtered outside the U.S.

Most of the beef and pork we import comes from Canada and Mexico. About half of our lamb and mutton is imported to the U.S. from New Zealand and Australia.

The Department of Agriculture calls its new country-of-origin labeling mandate a “consumer information program,” not a food safety issue. The USDA says all of our meat, whether processed here or abroad, goes through food safety checks that are equivalent – though not necessarily identical – to ours in the U.S. Still, Chandler Goule of the National Farmers Union, which generally represents smaller farmers and ranchers and supports COOL, says health concerns are one reason some consumers want to know more about their steak.