Abstract
Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is widely used for quality and process control in the food industry. In the meat industry, the method is still used mainly for determination of fat, water, and protein content, while new applications are emerging. In this paper, we report on how in-line NIRS can be used to detect and sort chicken breast fillets with the myopathies wooden breast and spaghetti meat from normal fillets. A total of 270 fillets were measured with 2 different near-infrared systems. The near-infrared spectra contained information about protein content and water-binding properties that showed systematic differences between the 3 quality classes. Wooden breast could be well separated fro m normal fillets (96% correct classification), while spaghetti meat was slightly more difficult to separate from both normal and wooden breast because properties measured by NIRS were overlapping between the 3 groups. Two quite similar NIRS instruments had quite different classification performance, which emphasizes the importance of optimizing spectroscopic instrumentation for different applications.
Highlights
Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is a potent method for industrial quality control and process monitoring, and the potential for process optimization is large (Grassi and Alamprese, 2018)
We present a feasibility study on how NIRS can be used for in-line detection of so-called spaghetti meat (SM), a myopathy in chicken breasts
The spectra shown are from one normal fillet, one SM, and one severe woody breast (WB)
Summary
Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is a potent method for industrial quality control and process monitoring, and the potential for process optimization is large (Grassi and Alamprese, 2018). The method has been reviewed for other potential meat applications (Porep et al, 2015; Dixit et al, 2017) and appears to be a promising method for rapid and nondestructive determination of quality features such as water-holding capacity, tenderness, pH, and specific fatty acids. None of these potential applications has reached the meat industry as a commercial tool. There are at least 3 reasons why reported novel NIRS applications for meat do not reach the market as commercial solutions: 1. The actual feasibility of the application is questionable (causality is not clear and application is developed and tested to a very limited extent)
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