There are two regulatory pieces we're missing here in Canada. Our American counterparts are more competitive within the U.S. and internationally in terms of extrapolating more meat from cattle specifically than we can in Canada, and it costs our beef processors a significant amount of money every year.
Number one is specified risk material or the enhanced feed ban. It has two different names depending on who you're speaking to. This originated when we had BSE, the foreign animal disease, in Canada about 20 years ago. The U.S. brought in regulatory changes to deal with this at that time, but they have moved forward and past those regulatory changes to allow beef processors in the U.S. to derive more meat from the carcasses of cattle, specifically for pet food.
We're not there yet. We've had good signals from the Government of Canada that we'll get there likely by the end of the year, but there's still some work to be done. The issue that's newer per se is defatted meat. In the U.S, for five-plus years, they have been able to use this new innovation, an extrapolation process, to take the lean trim—the fat from the cow—and put it in a process to extrapolate more ground beef from the carcass and out of the lean trimmings.
Here in Canada, we are not allowed to use that extrapolation process and mix the ground beef taken out of it with the ground beef that we deliver to Canadians, but we are—and this is the crazy part—allowed to extrapolate ground beef and export it to the U.S. for them to use. We're allowed to export it, but we're not allowed to use it here in Canada.
That's why we're working with the CFIA to try to get our regulations on defatted beef updated so we can use this new innovation, which would allow us to get more ground beef from the cattle supply we already have here in Canada. Our economic impact study shows that it could lower the price of ground beef on the store shelf by over 5%. There's a real benefit here to the affordability for Canadians.