Canada has an extensive range of research centres, food incubators, accelerators and labs supporting food and beverage innovation through the research they do and/or the services they offer. Each week throughout 2023, we’ll be highlighting an organization that’s supporting food innovation in Canada.
Name: The Meat Science Laboratory at the University of Guelph.
Location: Guelph, ON.
Focus: The Meat Science Lab is a small-scale meat packing plant operating under federal meat inspection regulations with the capability to slaughter, cut, and process red meat species.
Mission: To provide student training and perform research in meat science. The lab also harvests tissue and organ samples for research programs in other University of Guelph departments.
Services: The Meat Science Lab’s abattoir offers students experience in slaughter operations. As well as research and teaching, the lab offers services to companies requiring specialized facilities and expertise, as well as meat product workshops in cooperation with the meat industry.
What you need to know: The lab’s cutting room is equipped to process carcasses into wholesale or retail cuts, or to carry out complete carcass dissections. Other features include:
- A smokehouse;
- Basic equipment necessary for manufacturing processed meat products;
- A blast freezer operating at -30 °C and an adjacent storage freezer kept at -20 °C for long-term storage of meat products;
- A texture profile analyzer;
- A fully equipped kitchen to cook and evaluate meat products.
Teaching areas include:
- The carcass dissection classroom;
- A glass-fronted display cooler for carcasses or meat cuts;
- A 99-seat lecture theatre for lectures or where carcass and meat cutting demonstrations are offered through use of the lab’s monorail system for meat.
Notable news: Each spring the Meat Science Lab helps the local Mennonite community prepare meat for canning through a mobile canning facility run by the Mennonite Central Committee. The canned meat is distributed to hungry people worldwide.
Get involved: Contact the Meat Lab manager Gino Giansante at ggiansan@uoguelph.ca, or reach out to our Regional Innovation Director for Ontario, Linda Fox.
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