A food-safety treatment that can sharply reduce harmful bacteria in ground poultry may do so without dramatically changing the meat, according to new research.
The study, published in Poultry Science, focused on a practical question: If poultry is treated to help control bacteria such as Salmonella and Campylobacter, will it still look, cook and taste the way people expect?
Researchers tested ground chicken and turkey using electron beam treatment, a type of food irradiation that does not rely on heat. An earlier study by the same team found that one dose of the treatment reduced experimentally added Salmonella and Campylobacter by 99.99%. This time, researchers looked at what that treatment did to the food itself.
Overall, the lower dose produced relatively few changes.
Ground turkey showed little difference from untreated turkey in cooking loss, color and most measures of texture. Ground chicken also remained similar in several ways, although its color changed somewhat and trained tasters detected an unusual aroma after treatment.
Those tasters did not find a significant difference in the chicken’s off-flavor, however. Turkey showed no significant differences in aroma or flavor.
At the higher treatment level, more changes began to appear, particularly in turkey. Researchers found differences in several measures of texture, suggesting that using more treatment is not necessarily better.
That is one of the study’s main practical findings. Food-safety treatments have to do more than control bacteria. They also have to preserve the qualities people expect when they buy and cook food.
Electron beam treatment works by exposing food to high-energy electrons that damage microorganisms so they can no longer reproduce. It is one form of food irradiation already approved for use on certain foods in the United States, and it does not make food radioactive.
For this experiment, researchers purchased commercially packaged ground chicken and turkey, treated the meat at two levels and compared it with untreated samples. They measured characteristics such as color, moisture loss during cooking and texture, then had seven highly trained sensory panelists evaluate the cooked poultry.
The sensory results were generally reassuring, but they also showed why the findings should not be reduced to “no difference.”
Most ratings were similar between treated and untreated poultry. The clearest exception was ground chicken, where panelists detected stronger off-notes in the aroma after treatment. They did not find the same effect in turkey.
The study also cannot tell us whether ordinary shoppers would notice those differences. The sensory panel consisted of trained experts who are experienced at picking up subtle changes in food. Consumer acceptance was not tested.
The experiment was relatively small as well, using three packages of each type of poultry at each treatment level. The researchers also noted that packaging could affect some of the changes caused by treatment and plan to study other packaging approaches.
Still, the results suggest there may be a workable balance between reducing food-safety risks and preserving the qualities people expect from ground poultry.
In this study, the lower treatment level appeared to come closest to that balance. Combined with the research team’s earlier findings on Salmonella and Campylobacter, it offers another step toward understanding whether this technology could eventually be used more widely in poultry processing.
The research was supported in part by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service and the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture’s Organic Agriculture Research and Extension Initiative.