Overview of Probiotic Meat Products

Meat provides an excellent medium for growth and carrying of probiotics that leads to improvement in functional value, beneficial effect on health and organoleptic properties. However, during meat processing, the high salt content and processing at high temperature causes major challenge in the survival of probiotic cultures. Fermented meat and meat products important functional meat products and this segment is still dominated by the probiotic meat products. Thus dry- and semi-dry sausages are most appropriate for carrying probiotics due to processing these sausages at low temperature. To get the desirable pact on nutritive value and quality of meat products addition to positive effect on human health, the probiotic culture should have good fermentation ability. At present, lactic acid bacteria and Bifidobacterium dominate the list of most used probiotics in the food industry due to their desirable properties. The selection of a proper probiotic culture that fulfill all the criteria of a desirable probiotic to produce functional meat products and proper validation of health claims are the need of the hour to tap the full potential of the probiotic meat products. The ever-increasing growing demand of functional meat products with probiotics provides an open arena with lots of opportunities for meat industry.