Quality and Processability of Modern Poultry Meat

The poultry meat industry has gone through many changes. It moved from growing dual-purpose birds (meat and egg production) taking similar to 110 days to reach 1.2 kg 100 years ago, to developing specialized meat breeds that grow to 2.5 kg within similar to 40 days. It also moved from selling similar to 80% whole birds to mostly selling cut up and further processed products in the Western world. This necessitated building large, centralized processing plants, capable of processing 15,000 birds per hr on a single line (60 years ago only 2500), that require higher bird uniformity (size, color, texture). Furthermore, consumer demand for convenient products resulted in introducing many cut-up fresh poultry (some companies have 500 SKU) and further processed products (chicken nuggets did not exist 50 years ago). Those developments were possible due to advancements in genetics, nutrition, medicine, and engineering at the farm and processing plant levels. Challenges keep on coming and today a rise in myopathies (e.g., so called woody breast, white striping, spaghetti meat), requires solutions from breeders, farmers, and processing plants, as more automation also requires more uniformity. This review focuses on the changes and challenges to the processing industry segment required to keep supplying high quality poultry to the individual consumer.