The use of chitosan as a coating material on meat industry

In this study, chitosan which is a material of carbohydrate based edible films and its effects on vacum packaging and microbial and chemical properties of red meat were studied. Red meat has a limited shelf life due to being fresh with having high amount of water activity. Therefore, plenty of studies have recently been carried out to enhance the shelf life of red meat. Fort his reason, chitosan is also used as an edible packaging material due to many advantages such as being edible, having no toxic effects and showing antimicrobial and antifungal activity and so on. In the study, normal red meat, normal red meat covered with chitosan, red meat which is vacum packaged and vacum packaged plus chitosan covered red meat were stored at + 4ºC. The storage time of meat samples which are not vacum packaged were selected as to be 7 days and during this time the samples were analyzed on the first, third, fifth and seventh days, respectively. On the other hand, the storage time of vacum packaged red meats were selected as to be 45 days and during this time the samples were analyzed on the first, fifteenth, thirtieth and forty fifth days, respectively. Total mesophile aerob bacteria, Staphylococcus aureus and Salmonella counting analysis were performed on chitosan coated and vacuum packaged red meat samples. As a chemical analysis, on the other hand, TBA numbers were analyzed. It has been concluded that chitosan remarkably inhibited the the growth of total mesophile aerobes, Staphylococcus aerus (p<0,05) and that vacum packaging was more effective on reducing the TBA number on read meat.