The performance of slow air, air blast and water immersion cooling methods in the cooked meat industry was evaluated by a validated finite element model, The cooked meat joints in commercial and controlled geometries were cooled by these three traditional cooling methods under different operating conditions. Simulations showed that it is difficult for traditional cooling methods to cool the large commercial cooked meat joints because the poor thermal conductivity of meat controls the cooling rate. It takes about 8.5, 6.5 and 3.5 h for air blast cooling with an air velocity of 3 m/s and an air temperature of 0degreesC to reduce the cooked meat joints in a typical ellipsoid shape with the weights of 8, 5 and 2 kg from the core temperature of 74-10degreesC, respectively. For water immersion cooling with water velocity of 0.15 m/s and water temperature of 0degreesC, the cooling times can be reduced to 7, 5 and 2.8 h, respectively. A rapid cooling can be achieved by controlling the shortest dimension. For cooling a cooked meat joint with the weight more than 5 kg by air blast cooling to meet the cooling requirements specified in cook-chill guidelines, the infinite slab shape with the shortest dimension of 5 cm and an infinite cylinder with the diameter of 10 cm was chosen. For water immersion cooling, the shortest dimension of the brick-shaped meat joints could be increased to near 10 cm. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.