Meat and seafood products are highly perishable foodstuffs, the preservation of which is crucial. Indeed, a bad preservation of these products may lead to important hygienic and safety risks as well as considerable economic loss, a situation that is particularly true for novel products. The utilisation of protective cultures in order to limit these risks is proposed since several years but is still not in common use, partially because a lack of knowledge of microbial ecosystems of these products. The partners of the French network FLOREPRO decided to share their know-how and scientific knowledge on one hand, and their various expertise about food on the other hand, in order to increase the knowledge of meat and seafood products and on the impact of protective cultures on these ecosystems and on the quality of the products. Our aim is thus to provide a sound scientific based information on the benefit that the utilisation of protective cultures may represent in the production of meat/fish foodstuffs. The project is divided into three tasks: - an as exhaustive as possible characterisation of the ecosystem of height selected products (meat and seafood) by the up to date most performing method, 16S rDNA pyrosequencing of the bacterial DNA present on these products, at the time of production and after the use by date. This task also encompasses the selection of putative spoiler micro-organisms from those products; - set up and sharing of model matrices and sensory analysis in order to reproduce spoilage and to prove the spoiling properties of the strains selected from the first task; - evaluation of the impact of already available protective cultures on spoilage, sensorial quality, and global ecosystem of the products we propose to study. The partners of this project are academics, agro institutes and one SME which was a pioneer in the commercialisation of protective cultures. Other industries, SMEs with no financial support, joined the project to furnish the foodstuffs to be analysed. Know-how, expertise and missions of the partners are complementary and about meat/fish products. The foodstuffs we selected are representative of a large panel of origins (beef, veal, poultry, fish, shellfish) and processes (ground, diced cubes, fillets, peeled) and concern novel products for which knowledge about their ecosystem and sanitary quality is scarce.