Abstract
During cutting and processing of meat, the loss of water is critical in determining both product quality and value. From the point of slaughter until packaging, water is lost due to the hanging, movement, handling, and cutting of the carcass, with every 1% of lost water having the potential to cost a large meat processing plant somewhere in the region of €50,000 per day. Currently the options for monitoring the loss of water from meat, or determining its drip loss, are limited to destructive tests which take 24–72 h to complete. This paper presents results from work which has led to the development of a novel microwave cavity sensor capable of providing an indication of drip loss within 6 min, while demonstrating good correlation with the well-known EZ-Driploss method (R2 = 0.896).
Highlights
From the point at which an animal is slaughtered during the meat production process, it is inevitable that water will be lost from the carcass
The term drip loss, or its reciprocal parameter Water Holding Capacity (WHC), is used by the food industry to refer to the ability of meat products to retain water, with much of our current knowledge on the topic being based on fundamental research by Hamm [6] in 1960, followed by Offer and Trinick [7]
Discussion measurement and the other being used for measurements with the microwave cavity sensor
Summary
From the point at which an animal is slaughtered during the meat production process, it is inevitable that water will be lost from the carcass. It is estimated that for large production facilities (i.e., those processing in the order of thousands of animals per day), for every 1% of water lost, this could equate to €50,000 (this estimate is based up on a large processing plant, but is dependent on the volume of meat trimmings produced in addition to the market value of meat at the time of processing) per day in lost revenue For this reason, meat producers are keen to employ new tools which enable them to monitor the production process more quickly and effectively than current methods allow, permitting minimization of water loss.
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