Hayriye Cetin-Karaca, Ph.D., is a Research Scientist in the technical services department at Smithfield Foods. She provides scientific and technical support to food safety and leads the challenge study and research programs.
The COVID-19 pandemic has 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 processors. The most common challenges for reformulation are reduction of sodium and replacing additives such as nitrite and preservatives.
