Processing innovations for tailoring eating quality and nutrition of meat-based foods

Meat-based foods continue to play an important role in human diets, yet their future relevance will depend increasingly on how effectively eating quality, nutritional value, resource efficiency, and sustainability can be improved through processing innovation. This chapter examines how processing strategies can be deliberately designed to enhance the sensory and nutritional performance of meat-based foods across whole-muscle, minced, restructured, and hybrid systems. It first considers advances in post-mortem ageing, showing how conventional wet- and dry-ageing can be further refined through stepwise and tailored ageing approaches to better control tenderness, flavour development, yield, and consistency across muscles, species, and consumer segments. The chapter then explores the integration of freezing/thawing with ageing as a practical route to improving the quality of frozen meat by managing structural and biochemical changes more effectively. In minced and restructured systems, attention is given to meat-to-meat fortification, nutrient enrichment with meat co-products, and hybrid meat production as strategies to increase nutritional density, valorise underutilised resources, and broaden product offering. The chapter further discusses hybrid meat as an emerging processing concept and highlights the HYBRID meat framework as a systems-based approach for guiding ingredient selection, matrix compatibility, process design, and consumer-oriented product development. Innovative processing technologies, culinary developments and enabling tools are also considered as means to translate processing gains into consumer value. Collectively, these perspectives show how a more integrated, processing-led strategy can help deliver meat-based foods that are sensory optimised, nutritionally robust, economically viable, and responsive to evolving consumer preferences and sustainability expectations.