Location: Quality and Safety Assessment Research Unit
Project Number: 6040-42440-001-020-A
Project Type: Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Sep 22, 2025
End Date: Sep 21, 2029
Objective:
1. Develop black soldier fly larvae products with enhanced anti-salmonella properties for poultry feed or supplements.
2. Develop new processes to extract value from poultry processing solids and facilitate within-plant water recycling while reducing or eliminating pathogens.
3. Determine how poultry processing systems and food safety interventions impact both producer and consumer willingness to pay for food safety technologies and poultry products, respectively.
4. Develop a rapid sensor-based detection system to detect contamination in poultry using volatile chemistry.
Approach:
Strategies for rearing black soldier fly larvae (BSFL) for poultry feed ingredients will be developed. BSFL contain antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) with anti-pathogen properties. Enhancement of anti-Salmonella properties in BSFL hemolymph using physical stimulation such as pricking of the outer cuticle has been shown. Research will develop rearing strategies to enhance anti-Salmonella properties of BSFL including pricking, compression, environmental stress, and diet containing Salmonella. Anti-Salmonella activity of resulting hemolymph and impact on AMP expression will be measured. Successful BSFL enhancements will be tested in poultry trials to understand impact on gut microbiome.
Strategies to valorize poultry processing solids from dissolved air flotation (DAF) units used in poultry processing plants will be developed. Currently, most DAF solids are land applied and cause nuisance odors. The goal is to convert materials into useful products that meet food safety standards. Methods for DAF valorization will be studied including feeding to BSFL to upcycle material back into pathogen free poultry feed. A second strategy will be to feed DAF solids to microorganisms to convert into biogas (energy). A third strategy will be to develop methods of rendering byproduct into value-added feed ingredients. Opportunities to increase water recycling within processing facilities without increasing microbial burden on final meat products will be explored. Plant water audits will be conducted that involve flows, microbial loads, and chemical constituents. Low-cost water treatment such as Bacillus bioreactors, electrocoagulation, and UV systems will be explored.
Microbial food safety risks across the poultry supply chain and industry-ready solutions will be investigated. Pilot scale and commercial trials will quantify how processing operations shape pathogen levels on carcasses, while multi-component intervention strategies will be designed to optimize Salmonella and Campylobacter control. Alternative antimicrobials to PAA will be evaluated for efficacy and compatibility with commercial systems. To support adoption, producer behavior and preferences for decision-support tools (e.g., real time pathogen alerts or contaminant monitoring) will be assessed. Advanced sensing will be incorporated through volatile organic compound profiling via ultra fast GC and portable e nose technologies to develop early-warning indicators of chemical contamination. Interventions will be systematically evaluated to ensure they do not introduce quality defects.
Producer willingness to pay for food safety monitoring and traceability technologies (e.g., contamination data dashboards, real-time pathogen alert systems, blockchain-verified traceability platforms) and consumer willingness to pay for food safety attributes on product labels will be investigated. Subjective value experiments will be combined with eye-tracking and affective emotional measures to determine how producers and consumers process and value food safety information, providing an empirical basis for technology design, feature prioritization, and label optimization that maximizes adoption of food safety investments.