mEATquality is a Horizon 2020 research project that analyses consumer attitudes, perceptions, and preferences regarding sustainable meat production to meet the demands of European citizens. The project is looking into the housing and management of two intensively kept livestock species: broiler chickens and pigs. "Changes in animal housing systems are expected in the coming years to comply with future updates of EU animal welfare legislation and to meet consumer demand for more sustainable pork and poultry meat from environmentally and welfare-friendly production systems", project partner Paolo Ferrari explains. The project focuses on the direct impact that certain critical factors related to extensive husbandry practices such as diet, genetics, and stocking density can have on the quality of meat.

The overall ambition of the mEATquality project is to provide consumers with better quality pork and broiler chicken meat, covering conventional farms, organic farms, and free-range systems. The project will do this by promoting extensive husbandry practices that consider both sustainability and animal welfare.

The project aims to inform consumers on the relationship between production methods and the quality of pork and broiler chicken meat through educational tutorials, videos, the EU Meat Database, and by sharing best practices. “Our food systems are constantly evolving, and so is the information that consumers get on meat products. Ensuring that they get the right information on the way meat is produced in relation to the quality of the product is very important: it allows them to make conscious decisions in the supermarket” says Hans Spoolder, project coordinator.

For example, the mEATquality Sustainability App, to be released in 2025, will advise pig and broiler chicken producers on the extensification of their farming systems and present “what if” options for their particular cases. Users of the app are asked to reply to a list of specific questions related to husbandry practices, environmental management, and farm economic resilience. The tool will benchmark farms and facilitate knowledge transfer between them. It will inform producers on how to make their farms more sustainable in terms of animal welfare, and economic and environmental aspects. The app will give producers the most efficient ‘formula’, combining the four husbandry factors addressed by mEATquality: genetics, forage, quality of space and space allowance.

Finally, the project partners will create a new protocol to assess farm economic resilience, not only in terms of economic performance, but also in terms of farmers’ capacity to adapt to economic stresses such as the volatility of input and output prices, or changes in market demand. Additionally, an innovative technique will be developed to analyse stress hormones in broiler feathers and pig hair of animals exposed to different levels of intensiveness. This new laboratory analysis will become a tool to support farmers in assessing and monitoring animal welfare for farm advice and/or certification.