Foodomics to investigate meat tenderness

•Foodomics integrates omics technologies in the field of food science.•Early omics approaches in the field mainly relied upon genomics and transcriptomics.•Mass spectrometry-based proteomics and metabolomics are gaining momentum.•PTM analyses started revealing unexpected clues about tenderization processes.

We describe the recent trends in investigations of meat tenderness by highlighting the main technical improvements, especially in proteomics and metabolomics. We also describe how these approaches have been so far applied to explore tenderness-related issues. In the last section, we outline how these technical improvements might be applied to other meat science-related issues, such as meat safety.