Novel Technology for Rapid Carcase Chilling Stage 1

Summary

Very fast chilling (VFC) is defined in the literature as reducing meat temperature to 0C within 5 hours of slaughter.  Previous research in Europe  demonstrated that VFC can result in meat of acceptable tenderness, but problems with consistency have prevented adoption by industry.
These projects investigated ways to improve the consistency of tenderness from VFC.   Findings suggested that consistent tenderness could be achieved using VFC and there were several options to do this.  Cost benefit analyses showed that adoption of VFC was likely to be economically favourable and that more research into VFC was warranted to facilitate adoption by the Australasian red meat industry.
While several methods of very fast chilling were trialled, to date none of these have been commercially viable, or resulted in conistent improvement on eating quality.