The COVID-19 pandemic impacted meat production, supply chain, and meat prices that caused a severe socio-economic crisis worldwide. Initially, meat and meat products' prices increased due to less production and increased demand because of panic buying. Whereas, later on, both meat production and demand were significantly decreased due to lockdown restrictions and lower purchasing power of the consumers that results in a decrease in meat prices. In early April 2020, meat packing facilities started to shut down due to the rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus among workers. Furthermore, meat producers and processors faced difficulty in harvesting and shipment of the products due to lockdown situations, decrease in labor force, restrictions in movement of animals within and across the country and change in legislation of local and international export market. These conditions adversely impacted the meat industry due to decrease in meat production, processing and distribution facilities. It is suggested that the integration among all the meat industry stakeholders is quite essential for the sustainability of the industry's supply chain to cope with such devastating conditions the future may hold. This review aimed to discuss different aspects of the meat industry and supply chain during the COVID-19 pandemic and proposed some future directions.

Meat quality is of great interest to producers, consumers, and scientists, as it mainly includes tenderness, color, water-holding capacity, and nutritional value of meat (Hopkins & Geesink, 2009). Tenderness is considered the most critical palatability factor that can affect meat quality (Koohmaraie & Geesink, 2006). Researchers found that inadequate tenderness plays a significant role in consumer dissatisfaction while they are willing to pay extra money on guaranteed tender beef (Feldkamp, Schroeder, & Lusk, 2005). The tenderness is primarily influenced by the production and processing factors. The production factors mainly include animal species, breed, gender, age, weight at slaughter, and nutritional management at the farm. On the other hand, processing factors generally involve postharvest-specific techniques like carcass chilling and aging to enhance the tenderness of beef. Among the production factors, animal age at slaughter has a strong impact on tenderness (Lawrence, Whatley, Montgomery, Perino, & Dikeman, 2001). Most of the studies have consistently concluded that the advancement of animal age leads to a decrease in beef tenderness due to the deposition of heat-stable collagen fibers (Xiong et al., 2007).

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The current study aimed to determine the effects of different levels of Zingiber officinale as a herbal feed additive on growth performance, carcass characteristic, serum biochemistry, total bacterial count (TBC), gut morphology, and immunological parameters of broilers. A total of 1500, day-old broiler chicks (Hubbard) were equally accredited to five treatment groups, each with six replicates (50 birds/replicate). Five experimental diets were prepared using basal diet i.e. with antibiotics positive control (PC), 3 g/kg ginger (group A), 6 g/kg ginger (group B), 9 g/kg ginger (group C) and without antibiotics negative control (NC). Group A and C showed significantly (p<0.05) higher feed intake (FI) as compared to other groups. Group C showed significantly (p<0.05) lower Total bacterial count (TBC) followed by group B as compared to NC. Carcass characteristics showed non-significant effects among different treatments. Mean villi length and width were significantly (p <0.05) higher in all ginger supplemented groups as compared to the control groups. Blood serum parameters including cholesterol, triglycerides, and low-density lipoproteins (LDL) were significantly (p<0.05) lower in groups B and C in comparison with the control groups. Whereas high-density lipoproteins (HDL) was significantly higher in group B as compared to the others. In conclusion, ginger supplementation @0.6% in the basal diet significantly improved growth performance and gut morphometry of broilers. It also showed a positive impact on cholesterol, triglycerides and gut microbes. Therefore, ginger could be a better substitute for antibiotic growth promoters.

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