Factors Affecting Poultry Meat Quality and Flavor: Physico-Chemical Attributes and Sensory Evaluation

Dear Colleagues,

Poultry rearing is one of the most popular farming methods due to its efficient feed conversion, which leads to high productive performance and profitability. The total production of poultry meat in the world is the largest among other types of meat, amounting to 138 million tonnes in 2022.

However, today, consumers of meat expect high-quality products with health-promoting properties and original flavor, as well as for their meat to be obtained from animals reared in a natural and sustainable way. This is favored by the long-term increase in the standard of living and environmental awareness of consumers who are seeking such products.

It is well known that aroma compounds determine the flavor of food. These, and especially key odorants, are very important in the evaluation of food quality by consumers, since it has been believed that about 90% of sensations accompanying the consumption of various food products by humans are in fact olfactory sensations. The meat aroma may depend on gender, species, breed, feeding, housing conditions, welfare, stress, diseases, and the ripening of the meat or carcass from which a product is made. Additionally, the odor is strongly influenced by thermal treatment, in which volatile compounds are formed in the Maillard reactions.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews should contain any aspects regarding the flavor quality of poultry meat. These may concern traditional products and cover studies on volatile compound composition, GC-olfactory and sensory assessments, as well as topics on classification and chemometric discrimination, including the description of other physicochemical parameters.

We look forward to your submissions.

Dr. Robert Gąsior
Prof. Dr. Władysław Migdał
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Animals is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.