When Mary Anne Amalaradjou looks at a chicken processing line, she sees more than poultry — she sees an opportunity to prevent illness before it starts. The UConn associate professor of animal science has spent years working with probiotic bacteria to raise healthier chickens. Now, in a study published in Poultry Science, she and her team have demonstrated something that could make chicken safer for millions of people: a simple, low-cost chilling method that significantly reduces Salmonella on chicken skin.
Salmonella causes an estimated 1.35 million infections in the United States each year, according to the CDC, with poultry among the most common sources. The bacteria are remarkably persistent — they hide in skin folds and feather follicles, surviving the washing steps that should clean the carcass. Even after chilling, contamination can linger all the way to the dinner table.
Amalaradjou's approach targets that exact moment. "Once the bird is sacrificed, the carcass is chilled, which helps maintain the meat quality and it helps reduce bacterial growth," she explains. "We thought that's a perfect vantage point. If something is added to that water while the carcass is chilling, it could also help control Salmonella."
The key innovation lies in what she calls postbiotics — beneficial molecules that probiotic bacteria produce as they grow. Unlike living probiotic cultures, postbiotics are soluble in water and unaffected by temperature, which means they can be mixed directly into existing chill tanks without special formulations. For the study, Amalaradjou's team combined these postbiotic compounds with oxygen nanobubbles, then simulated the commercial chilling process on chicken skin samples inoculated with Salmonella. The results were immediate and promising: the postbiotic-aerated treatment reduced Salmonella levels on the skin, and critically, it did so without any perceived impact on skin quality — a detail that matters enormously for consumer acceptance.
The probiotic species used to produce these postbiotics, Lacticaseibacillus, is already classified by the FDA as Generally Recognized As Safe, which could streamline any future adoption. The team is now scaling up: first testing the method on chicken parts, then on full carcasses, working with extension specialist Indu Upadhyaya to ensure the research meets the real needs of processors and producers.
That collaboration is already paying off. In a recent survey conducted with industry stakeholders, Amalaradjou asked how likely producers would be to adopt the method if it proves effective at scale. Seventy percent said they would be open to integrating it into their current practices — a striking signal of readiness in an industry that rarely adopts new interventions lightly.
"We wanted to come up with a system that will help support production and also reduce the food safety risks," Amalaradjou says. "If they can use one tool to do both, something that helps them in terms of the feed costs or the overall economy of their production system, that's where we started working with probiotics."
She is careful to emphasize that the work is not finished. But the foundation is laid for something that could quietly transform how chicken is processed — not with flashy technology, but with a clever use of biology already found in nature.