On behalf of the Processed Meats Competition Committee, welcome to the 2023 Virtual Processed Meats Contest. It has been our goal to present a contest that provides a challenging and educational experience. While meats judging as an intercollegiate contest has had a long standing history, an increased focus on processed meats and value added processing education has seen more momentum recently. The numerous career opportunities in production or supporting that sector of the industry has created a strong demand for programs such as this.

To help you prepare for the contest, I wanted to highlight a few key points to keep in mind.

1. Familiarize yourself with some of the terminology and characteristics common to the processed meat products. The American Meat Science Association is continuing to develop  Processed Meats (tovuti.io)
2. The committee will be looking to help students understand where value for a product lie in processed meats. For fresh meat evaluation, quality and cutability can usually lead to the correct placement of a class. For processed meats, it is not always clearly understood how much value a characteristic or defect can add or subtract from a value basis. Our intent is to move forward with helping to define this more clearly.
3. New to the contest this year is class scenarios. The goal for the scenario addition is to further the critical thinking aspect of judging and provide more exposure to potential customer requirements in value added production.

We sincerely thank you for your participation in the contest. We hope you find value in the content and enjoy value in the experience.