Improving Poultry Meat Quality

Recent years have seen a meteoric rise in the number of consumers wishing to know more about the journey their food takes from farm to fork. Consumer expectations on the sensory and nutritional qualities of food products has risen as a result of this. Poultry producers and processors must balance these quality parameters with other requirements, such as yield, which may affect other quality traits.

Improving poultry meat quality addresses the wealth of recent research on the genetic and environmental factors affecting the development of quality traits in poultry meat and their potential implications for breeding, husbandry and postharvest processing. This collection reviews recent advances in understanding colour, texture and flavour development in poultry meat, as well as the health-promoting components of poultry meat when consumed as part of a healthy, balanced diet. This collection also considers an array of poultry myopathies, such as deep pectoral myopathy (DPM) and white striping, and their potential role in the development of quality defects which can impact bird health, welfare and productivity, as well as future shelf-life.