Can red meat flavour become a trait?

Meat flavour is now recognised as the most important sensory attribute of red meat. There is currently no way of capturing the flavour components that drive consumer liking for red meat. Understanding the drivers for red meat flavours provides a commercial opportunity for red meat processors. An MSA score of MQ4 provides an eating quality guarantee but cannot be used to measure flavour. Meat flavour is the result of a complex chemical profile generated during the cooking of raw meat. There is an opportunity to develop standard laboratory-based flavour analysis protocols that capture the flavour components driving consumer liking. Recently, meat consumption and flavour liking has also been linked to consumer emotional concepts such as wellbeing, happiness and satiety. Very little work has been done connecting meat flavour to emotion and mood/wellbeing and the project proposes to apply learnings in other food, to meat. The project will investigate the link between flavour chemistry, consumer characterisation of flavour, consumer liking of flavour, consumer emotional response and the MSA-style assessments of eating quality, quality grading and willingness to pay. The hypothesis of this research proposal is that understanding the consumer response to meat flavour is key to enable increased consumer demand for meat products, diversified brands and value adding. The industry can then realise the commercial benefits of optimising and maintaining flavour profiles for flavour differentiated meat products.