MLA introduced to the Australian red meat industry High Pressure Processing (HPP) in November 2009 at a workshop hosted by CSIRO to showcase the technology and value adding red meat opportunities – namely to increase shelf life and addition of another level of food safety and potential for less reliance on preservatives degradation of vitamins and flavour reduced to a minimum. As with any new technology platform, the learning curve has continued by exploring the HPP mechanisms at various time, temperature, pressure settings and muscle profiling and biophysical assessments (texture, cook loss, colour).

The overall objective of this project was to compare the impact of HPP at low and high temperature to other interventions and cook methods – in particular, evaluation of tenderisation (texture), colour and yield for control and aged samples for several beef cuts.