Utilizing microbiome and bioinformatic tools to reduce energy use and food waste in poultry. Chicken Chilling Project

Poultry is a massive and growing industry with substantial energy costs, partly due to rapid cooling necessary to preserve meat quality and shelf-life. In the United States, water chilling (WC) is commonly employed, although air chilling (AC) requires almost 50 times less gross energy. There is a knowledge gap about the holistic effects of WC vs AC on poultry meat products that likely inhibits the poultry industry from adopting AC, which is widely used in Europe. Measuring product quality and shelf-life can be challenging and expensive. We propose here a novel approach to this aspect of poultry science - to utilize microbiome tools to characterize poultry microbial ecology during processing through to retail display, and determine how it relates to quality, shelf-life, and nutritive status. Our goals are two-fold. We will provide a comprehensive assessment of the effects of WC vs AC on poultry quality, including nutritive value, shelf-life, and microbial ecology. Secondly, we will provide the industry with a novel microbiome tool for inexpensively, and accurately characterizing the microbial communities associated with meat, which we suspect are predictive of quality, shelf-life and nutritive status.