Consumer habits continue to drive food industry focus to ingredient statements and nutrition panels. The push for clean-label items is shifting the food industry to reevaluate the ingredients and their usage rates. This shift became more evident over 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic significantly shifted consumer demand away from restaurants and foodservice to home meals and ready-to-eat (RTE) meat and poultry products. As a complement for more convenience-type items, consumers began focusing on product expiration dates to limit trips to retail markets. Combined with consumers' nutritional focus on sugar, sodium, fat content, and additives, meeting these expectations and requirements is a serious challenge for meat and poultry producers. The most common challenges for reformulation are reduction of sodium and replacing additives such as nitrite and preservatives.
In October 2021, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) published a voluntary guidance for the food industry to reduce sodium in commercially processed, packaged, and prepared foods to decrease the excess sodium intake in the U.S. population.1 Salt provides about 90 percent of the sodium in the human diet and is essential for the maintenance of cellular membrane potential and the absorption of nutrients in the small intestine. Furthermore, its presence determines the volume of extracellular fluid, thereby maintaining blood volume and pressure. However, excessive consumption of sodium is associated with negative health effects such as elevated blood pressure. For meat processors, the new guidelines lay out different short-term targets to reduce sodium for selected categories of products, such as targeting 860–980 mg sodium per 100 g for deli meats and 1,570 mg sodium per 100 g for bacon. According to FDA, these reduction targets should not degrade the nutritional quality of the food by increasing the sugar content, nor should the food safety properties of the food be negatively affected, which is a challenge to formulators.