As a spin-off of an OECD Workshop on pork quality, held in Helsinki in 1992, a group of scientists with many years of experience in the field of meat quality assessment convened in February 1993 for the first time, and subsequently in 1994 and 1995, in Kulmbach at the German Federal Centre for Meat Research under the auspices of the OECD research project Management of Biological Resources. Three specific areas were discussed in order to develop internationally accepted reference methods: In the autumn of 1997 the methods were brought into their final form at the Meat Industry Research Institute of New Zealand (MIRINZ). They are presented in this paper.