ABSTRACT
The aim of food processing is to transform raw food materials into edible, safe, wholesome, digestible, nutritious food products, with desirable physical and chemical properties, extended shelf life and optimal organoleptic characteristics. Further developing food products with novel functional features or optimized functional components can be difficult. Often the production of functional features increases the level of complexity and monitoring needed in the food product development process from the generation of the idea to the launch of the new product.Overall, the market share of functional food products is currently dominated by dairy products. To obtain a health benefit the probiotic strains added to the food product should be present in numbers higher than 106 cfu per gram of product (Kołożn-Krajewska and Dolatowski, 2012). Heat processed meat products would not fit in the category of a functional food. The heat treatment applied in this manufacturing process would decrease the activity or viability of any probiotic microorganism that could have been added to the food productresulting in a dramatic reduction in the expected health benefits. On the other hand, fermented meat products could potentially provide a good matrix to deliver probiotics to consumers demanding a higher availability of functional food products in the markets’ shelves, (Saxelin et al. 2000, Heller 2001). Additionally, consumers are familiar with the fact that fermented food products contain living microorganisms.
