Harmonization of methodology of assessment of meat quality features

The dramatic changes in the market forms for poultry in recent years, from a predominantly whole bird commodity to modern highly diversified industry focused on cut up, deboned meat, and ready-to-eat further processed products, has resulted in a change of quality expectation. The major poultry meat quality attributes are appearance, texture, juiciness, flavour, and functionality. With increasing trends in further processing, meat functionality has increased in relative importance, especially because of its key role in determining the sensory quality of complex ready-to-eat products. Many different methods measuring meat quality traits are available which are based on different principles, and instruments and/or probes. Particular attention should be taken also in order to standardize meat sample preparation and handling before and during analysis. In view of the complexity of meat processes during post-mortem time and quality trait determination, it is not surprising that the results obtained in different studies and laboratories are not always in agreement with. For comparison of results it is therefore necessary to keep strictly to the measuring specifications and that is why standardisation is indispensable. The Working Group 5 “Poultry Meat Quality” of the WPSA European Federation has been proposed to produce a document which would serve as a common base methodology that would permit comparison between researches carried out by different groups, based on international research programme. This paper represents the first step of this work including chemical (moisture, total lipids, proteins, ash, fatty acid composition, cholesterol, susceptibility to oxidation, amino acids, collagen and pigments) and physical traits (pH, R-value, colour, water holding capacity, texture and sarcomere length), while sensory traits will be included in a second step. For the evaluation of chemical composition, there are still standard methods which are largely adopted in the majority of published papers. On the contrary, there is still a need to standardize methods for determining the physical traits to facilitate comparisons between studies and to provide reference values.