Five years of research on chicken, beef and dairy quality came together in Brussels on 29 October, with a clear message for farmers, quality schemes and policymakers: the best system depends on what you want to optimise.

Brussels, 29 October 2026 – The Horizon 2020 project INTAQT presented its final results at a hybrid seminar hosted by Copa-Cogeca. After five years of work in ten countries, the project’s main conclusion is that no single production system performs best on every quality criterion, whether for chicken, beef or dairy products.

A final look at “One Quality” research

The seminar, titled Combining Sustainable Farming with High-Quality and Authentic Chicken and Cattle Products, ran from 09:30 to 12:30 CET at Copa-Cogeca (Rue de Trèves 61, Room A), with online participation open to those who could not travel.

INTAQT brought together 21 partners, including 11 academic institutions, 3 industry partners and 7 SMEs, between 2021 and 2026. Its “One Quality” concept links the intrinsic quality of products (health, nutritional value, sensory characteristics and processing properties) with the extrinsic quality of the livestock systems that produce them (animal welfare, environmental impact and economic and social sustainability). To study it, the team worked with more than 200 farms across Europe, covering a wide range of chicken, beef and dairy systems.

What the project found

Chicken. Presenting the poultry results, Cécile Berri (INRAE) showed that faster-growing chickens give a higher breast meat yield but come with trade-offs: lower protein content and amino acid digestibility, lower levels of the bioactive dipeptides anserine and carnosine, and more muscle defects such as white striping and wooden breast. The slowest-growing systems generally performed best on nutritional and health traits, while medium and fast-medium growing systems achieved good technological and sensory quality. No potentially harmful substances were detected on any of the farms studied.

Beef. Jean-François Hocquette (INRAE) reported on 55 beef farms. Differences in nutritional quality were linked mainly to the feeding regime and the age at slaughter, with extensive systems showing positive or neutral effects, for example on omega-3 fatty acids. In blind consumer tests in Italy, France and Poland, intensification did not create a gradient in eating quality, and the variation within each system was four to five times wider than the variation between system averages.

Dairy. Bruno Martin (INRAE) explained that milk from grass-based farms showed higher nutritional value, with more omega-3 fatty acids and higher levels of vitamins E, B2 and B12 and of calcium, while fat and protein content showed no dilution effect. Grass feeding gave milk and cheese a yellower colour and stronger flavours, but this distinctiveness did not translate into consistent consumer preference. For all three products, the contaminants measured stayed well below EU maximum levels.

Can farms perform on every front?

Eléa Caumette (INRAE) asked whether farm multiperformance is achievable by looking beyond product quality to productivity, environmental impact, feed-food competition and animal welfare. In broilers, the data show antagonisms between productivity and efficiency on one side and animal welfare and intrinsic quality on the other, with intermediate systems using fast-medium growing genotypes emerging as a potential compromise. Farm data also showed no significant difference in feed efficiency, productivity or environmental impacts between systems following the European Chicken Commitment and standard systems, although the literature had estimated higher emissions and costs for them.

In cattle, intensification raises productivity but increases feed-food competition, as animals consume more feed that humans could eat. Grass-based systems produce less, but they can be net protein producers and provide ecosystem services, which contributes to food security. Across sectors, the large variability within each system points to room for improvement in milk and meat quality without changing system.

From results to practice

Rennie Eppenstein (FiBL) showed how the project turned findings into something farmers and advisers can use. INTAQT worked with a multi-actor approach and ran living labs in which farmers, advisers and researchers tested changes on real farms. Maximising pasture and spring calving on dairy farms improved vitamin and fatty acid profiles while keeping satisfactory technological characteristics. On-farm hatching of fast-growing broilers improved health, performance, welfare and meat quality. For beef-on-dairy animals, the team studied genotypes suited to pasture fattening, drawing on slaughter data from 60,000 animals.

The project also produced practical tools. An open-source Python web application lets users visualise project data and make predictions with pretrained random forest models. A genetic test based on an SNP chip can authenticate Label Rouge chicken, of which 46 crosses are approved and 21 in use. Infrared spectroscopy supports quality assessment, and a portable near-infrared device distinguished indoor from outdoor beef with 73% accuracy. Practice abstracts and factsheets summarise the findings for farmers and advisers.

The presentation slides from the Final Seminar are available here:

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3