Is it safe to sell refrigerated meat in open display cases? Essential meat facts (2)

Last time we mentioned that many consumers feel that warm meat is fresher, but in fact it has the lowest level of freshness. Besides warm meat, consumers may also lean toward thinking that chilled meat is fresher than frozen meat, and may even think it tastes better, because frozen meat seems to have been stored for a long time, while chilled meat feels fresher. But is that really true?

Perhaps you buy fresh meat at a hypermarket near your home. For this kind of chilled meat, from slaughter, cutting and packaging to delivery to the hypermarket, and then to your selecting it and taking it home, how much time does it take? Just from the completion of slaughter to delivery to the store, does it take 1 hour? 8 hours? Or 3 days?

Usually, meat processed at the slaughterhouse must be transported by refrigerated truck to the supermarket's distribution center (whether a local supermarket or a mass merchandiser has one). If the supermarket or mass merchandiser has a cutting facility, then after centralized allocation at the distribution center, it is sent by the chain supermarket's vehicles to each store. If a small supermarket has no cutting facility, then there is an additional cutting time at the distribution center.

After arriving at each store, time is still needed for stocking the shelves, and not all the meat that arrives at the store is put on the shelves for sale at once. Some meat must first be placed in closed storage refrigerators with better refrigeration, and only a few boxes of meat are taken out at a time to the open refrigerated cases outside. Because they are open, the refrigeration temperature fluctuates up and down, which also causes the meat to spoil quickly. So not all of it is taken out at once. Depending on the sales rate, on-site staff replenish the stock at any time.

With this kind of open refrigerated case, no matter what, the whole process, from leaving the slaughterhouse to your buying it and taking it home, ranges from the 8 hours claimed by some supermarkets to 2-3 days. The key point is refrigeration throughout the entire process (at roughly 0-7 degrees, varying). I do not know whether you have had this experience: if you put meat in the refrigerator to thaw and forget to cook it, after about 3 days or more, the meat usually spoils, because refrigeration conditions can only slow down the spoilage of meat, not stop it. In fact, the refrigerated shelf life of meat is only about 7 days. I often have a question: why do consumers want to buy meat that has already begun to spoil halfway and take it home to freeze?

(Series to be continued)

Things you must know about meat (1) Frozen, chilled and freshly slaughtered meat: which is safest?