ABSTRACT
POULTRY meat is consumed all around the world and, over the last few decades, has increased in popularity in many countries. Among the reasons for this increased consumption are the relatively low costs of production, the rapid growth rate of poultry, the high nutritional value of the meat and the introduction of many new further processed products. Overall, the poultry industry has changed dramatically over the past 50 years. In the early 1900s, most poultry in the western world was produced in small flocks mainly to supply eggs to support small farm units, and the eggs and live birds’ byproduct of the egg enterprise were sold live in local markets. Today, the poultry industry is highly integrated and managed by a number of large corporations. Computers are used to formulate diets (e.g., least cost feed formulations), forecast market trends, control meat processing equipment, and lately, also to operate machine vision used for automatic inspection and grading. The Internet and E-commerce are starting to play a major role in marketing. For example, in the summer of 2000, some of the major North American meat processors created on-line business-to-business marketing for poultry meat.
