Microbial bioprotection: An opportunity to improve safety and quality of meat products in a sustainable way

In a changing world where sustainability has become a must, the food system has been identified as one of the weakest links where there is a need for innovative solutions to address longstanding and novel challenges related to food safety and quality. The current food system is facing enormous pressure to tackle environmental sustainability issues while guaranteeing safety and diversifying production. In the last years, the possibility to exploit naturally occurring competitive mechanisms, which regulate the homeostasis of microbial ecosystems, has attracted a lot of attention and interest. More specifically, in the food transformation sector, bacteriocins and bacteriocinogenic microorganisms have long been considered an innovation tool attracting the attention of the researchers and industries due to their potential application in the meat sector. This paper presents an analysis of the opportunities and the challenges of the use of bioprotection, also called biopreservation, in the food system as sustainable strategy to be implemented in meat production. Specifically methodologies to identify bacteriocinogenic strains, the effect of processing conditions on the expression of bacteriocin genes and the efficacy of bacteriocin producing strains to inhibit not only target microorganisms but whole spoilage consortia will be discussed.