Abstract: With the improvement of living conditions, people have increasingly higher requirements for food safety, quality and traceability, continuously promoting the development of efficient, sensitive, selective and information-rich analytical methods. Mass spectrometry (MS)-based metabolomics plays an important role in the fields of disease diagnosis, environmental monitoring and pharmaceutical analysis, and has been demonstrated to be able to solve some important challenges in food science such as food certification, food nutrition and food origin traceability. This review discusses the design ideas for MS-based metabolomics methods, including sample preparation, analysis platform and data processing. Recent advances in the application of MS-based metabolomics methods in meat quality and safety evaluation, authenticity identification, geographical origin tracing, processing and storage are also summarized in this review, and future directions and prospects are discussed. We hope that this review can provide a basis for further research on the effects of small molecular metabolites on the quality of meat products and to promote the development of high-quality meat products.

Key words: mass spectrometry; metabolomics; meat science; food safety and quality; authenticity identification; geographical origin traceability; processing and storage