Since the incident nuclei in heavy-ion collisions do not carry strangeness, the global net strangeness of the detected hadrons has to vanish. We show that there is an intimate relation between strangeness neutrality and baryon-strangeness correlations. In the context of heavy-ion collisions, the former is a consequence of quark number conservation of the strong interactions while the latter are sensitive probes of the character of QCD matter. We investigate the sensitivity of baryon-strangeness correlations on the freeze-out conditions of heavy-ion collisions by studying their dependence on temperature, baryon- and strangeness chemical potential. The impact of strangeness neutrality on the QCD equation of state at finite chemical potentials will also be discussed. We model the low-energy sector of QCD by an effective Polyakov loop enhanced quark-meson model with 2+1 dynamical quark flavors and use the functional renormalization group to account for the non-perturbative quantum fluctuations of hadrons.