•We introduced recent advances in hyperspectral imaging (HSI) systems.•We reviewed applications of detecting quality attributes of red meats using HSI.•We discussed challenges in using HSI such as dimensionality reduction.•Improving hardware and exploiting new algorithms are future trends of HSI. Red meats, such as pork, beef, and lamb meats, play an important role in people’s daily diet as they can provide good protein, vitamins, and minerals to promote human health. Either the meat processing industry or consumers usually evaluate meat quality with some common quality characteristics, which generally encompass microbiological attributes (freshness, spoilage), chemical attributes (fat, protein, moisture), sensory attributes (color, tenderness, flavor) as well as technological attributes (pH, water-holding capability). Manual inspection and chemical detection methods are tedious, time-consuming, and destructive. Consequently, fast and nondestructive methods are required for detecting these attributes in the modern meat industry. Hyperspectral imaging is one of the promising methods, which integrates the merits of imaging and spectroscopy techniques. This paper provides a comprehensive review on the recent development of hyperspectral imaging systems and their applications in detecting some important quality attributes of pork (color, drip loss, pH, marbling, tenderness, chemical compositions), beef (color, pH, tenderness, water-holding capacity, microbial spoilage), as well as lamb (color, drip loss, pH, tenderness, chemical composition). Finally, the future potential of hyperspectral imaging is also discussed.