## 1 Introduction  
Ready-to-eat (RTE) meat products are gaining popularity in the food market worldwide. Being safe for the consumer, these products include all processed meat and poultry products that do not require additional preparation before consumption. Therefore, the major factors promoting the market growth of such meat products are that these products are convenient to use, or in other words, require simple preparation for consumption, and are available in wide varieties [1, 2]. Poutlury meat, including meat from chickens, is widely used as a raw material for the production of meat products referred to as RTE foods. It is characterized by good processing properties and mild flavor [2; 3]. In particular, mechanically separated meat (MSM) is a profitable and attractive raw material for producing RTE meat products. MSM is also called \"mechanically deboned meat\" and \"mechanically recovered meat\" as these are obtained by applying external mechanical forces, such as pressure and/or shear force, to animal bones or parts of carcass from which most of the adjacent muscle and fat tissue has previously been removed by hand or machine. However, in Europe, MSM is not widely used for the production of processed meat, and its use is limited to thermally processed meat products. MSM is preferred for industrial processes due to its low cost and the fact that it can serve as an additional source of protein in meat product formulations. Moreover, MSM preparation allows more efficient use of edible slaughter products by reducing the number of biological by-products that would need to be neutralized. However, it must be noted that this raw material is more susceptible to oxidative and microbial deterioration and its further processing may therefore have an impact on the quality and safety of meat products containing this kind of material in the recipe composition [4; 5]. MSM from chickens is of nonuniform quality, and its quality as well as technological suitability is mostly determined by the production method. For example, \"low-pressure MSM\" is more similar to ground meat in structure and appearance due to the lower degree of damage to muscle cells compared to \"high-pressure MSM\" [6; 7]. RTE meat products are preserved by cooling, freezing, or a combination of heat treatment, packaging, and cooling [1; 8]. The deterioration in the quality of RTE and many other meat products observed over time is attributed to simultaneous chemical and microbiological changes [9]. Among the chemical processes, the stability of meat products during storage is significantly reduced by lipid oxidation, which is a multistage process and is influenced by many factors such as the recipe composition of the meat product, the degree of grinding meat and fat, and the use or absence of thermal processing [10]. The changes that deteriorate the quality and safety of various meat products can be limited by the use of antioxidants and preservatives. However, due to the distrust of consumers toward the usage of synthetic additives in food production, researchers are investigating the possibility of replacing them with plant-based ingredients with proven antioxidant and antibacterial properties. Ingredients such as dried and shredded plants, as well as essential oils or extracts obtained using various solvents, may be incorporated into meat products in a variety of forms. The possible applications of these substances to meat and meat products, as well as the mechanisms behind the preservative effect of bioactive compounds in essential oils and plant extracts obtained from various plants, have been discussed in earlier reviews [11; 12; 13]. It has been shown that plant-derived preparations can be applied to chicken meat and its products to improve their shelf life. [PERSON] et al. [14] reported that the essential oils of basil and rosemary significantly inhibited microbiological spoilage of chicken meat stored at +4 \({}^{\circ}\)C and reduced the number of _Salmonella_ cells in comparison to control samples. [PERSON] et al.