Abstract: The microorganism is the main cause for the chilled chicken decay. To investigate the effects of different package methods on the changes of microbes of chilled chicken during its shelf life, 60 yellow feather broilers with similar weight were randomly divided into three treatments, including treatments with no package, palletizing package, and vacuum package. During the whole experiment, all the chickens were kept at 0-4 ℃, samples were collected on 1, 3, 5, 7 d after treatment and analyzed for the changes of microbes and physicochemical indexes. Psychrobacter sanguinis, Psychrobacter faecalis, Acinetobacter lwoffii, Psychrobacter arenosus, Psychrobacter cryohalolentis, Moraxella osloensis, Pseudomonas azotoformans, Lactococcus raffinolactis, Psychrobacter celer and Escherichia coli were detected as the top 10 dominant bacteria in chilled chicken during its shelf life, which involved families of Aeromonadaceae, Moraxellaceae, Enterobacteriaceae, Pseudomonadaceae and Lactobacillaceae, particularly involved in phylum of Proteobacteria and Firmicutes. Results suggested that palletizing package and vacuum package inhibited the growth of Escherichia coli, particularly decreased the proportion of relative abundance of Psychrobacter sanguinis and Psychrobacter faecalis, which was helpful to suppress the deterioration of chilled chickens.

Key words: chilled chicken, palletizing package, vacuum package, shelf life, microbe