Poultry meat quality

Abstract

The two most important quality attributes for poultry meat are appearance and texture. Appearance is critical for both the consumers' initial selection of the product as well as for final product satisfaction. Texture is the single most important sensory property affecting final quality assessment. Appearance quality attributes include skin colour, meat colour, cooked meat pinkness, and appearance defects such as bruises and haemorrhages. Since appearance is so critical for consumer selection, poultry producers go to great lengths to produce products with the appropriate colour for a particular market and to avoid appearance defects which will negatively effect product selection or price. Historically, meat tenderness was primarily associated with live bird quality factors such as breed, sex, or age. However, modern production practices produce highly uniform young birds in which the major problems associated with meat texture are the result of processing errors or early deboning. Although other quality issues such as juiciness and flavour are important, they are more a function of product preparation and infrequent, but acute, production or processing errors which are usually easily corrected or avoided. An understanding of the major issues contributing to poultry colour and meat tenderness is critical to producing uniform quality products.