Food Insights

For the vast majority of processed meats, deli meat included, marination is the primary step that makes the final product palatable to consumers. Take a standard chicken breast, which is roughly 73% moisture. Cooking it down into a deli meat matrix costs you about 10–15% of its total weight in moisture, landing the finished product around 58–63%. For chicken breast, anything below 65% moisture reads as dry to the customer, and anything below 60% is effectively inedible. Marination is what closes that gap and makes sure the moisture content of the meat is above the palatable requirement for the customer. I’ll follow up with a longer report on the different marination manufacturing methods and how they improve our food safety and quality.