Chevon quality enhancement: Trends in pre- and post-slaughter techniques

Goat meat (chevon) consumption has increased in the US primarily due to the growing immigrant population. Chevon preference among mainstream consumers, however, has suffered from the misperception that it is inferior in quality to beef, lamb, or pork. Researchers have studied several pre- and post-slaughter techniques to enhance chevon quality. This paper will briefly review techniques that show promise to further improve quality characteristics of chevon. Among preslaughter factors, minimizing animal stress is an important step to quality chevon production, as stress can result in inferior meat quality characteristics. Diet can have a marked effect on nutritional properties of chevon, particularly fatty acid profile. Feeding goats a concentrate diet results in a higher level of oleic acid, but lower linolenic acid in the longissimus muscle, compared to feeding a hay diet. Dietary brown seaweed extract supplementation in goats results in increased color stability of chevon cuts because of higher antioxidant levels. Administration of a low dose of bovine somatotropin in goats does not influence meat quality characteristics or pre-rigor μ-calpain, m-calpain, and calpastatin activities. Several post-slaughter techniques have been studied and proven to be beneficial. It is well-established that aging chevon retail cuts significantly improves tenderness, and the caselife of chevon cuts is comparable to that of beef, lamb, and pork cuts. Postmortem electrical stimulation has been reported to significantly accelerate muscle glycolysis and improve tenderness of chevon. Subjecting deboned chevon cuts to hydrodynamic pressure processing or calcium chloride injections has been shown to significantly improve quality characteristics, particularly tenderness. With emerging markets for chevon in the US, there is a critical need for further research on pre- and post-slaughter techniques in goats to further improve product quality.