How Meat Is Tested
How is Meat Tested?
Meat testing is vital for ensuring the quality and safety of meat products. Producers must also comply with food safety regulations for meat. The Food Standards Agency publishes a meat industry guide for this purpose.
To put in place quality assurance procedures for meat products, food producers must account for all factors across the food chain that can affect meat quality. Most importantly, they must ensure they test meat regularly and rigorously.
There is a range of modern meat testing equipment that enables producers to do this.
What Should You Measure in Meat?
There are several key parameters that have a critical influence on the quality of meat:
Fat
Protein
Texture
Moisture.
These elements have an impact on the taste and overall quality of meat, and they are important in marketing meat products to an increasingly health-conscious public.
Testing covers a wide variety of methods, including analytical testing as well as quality and safety testing.
Why Testing Meat Products is Important
Meat products are not the same as raw meat. They are regulated products that naturally include fat and connective tissue.
However, for these products to be considered meat, they must only contain a certain amount of fat and connective tissue, up to certain limits. If a product exceeds these limits, the producer must declare added fat or connective tissue in the product’s listed ingredients.
For example, beef and lamb must contain no more than 25% fat and connective tissue. For pork, fat limits are 25%, and it’s 15% for birds.
Near infrared (NIR) spectroscopic analysers will analyse meat for fat content. These instruments are increasingly versatile. One example is the Perten DA NIR analyser.
NIR will also test meat products for protein and moisture content.
Measuring moisture is important as an indicator of quality, but also of potential growth of bacteria, yeast and moulds in meat products. Certain meat products require a lowering of water activity (AW) to prevent pathogens from growing.
Testing the texture of meat products is another key indicator of food quality. There are techniques for measuring the tenderness and toughness of meat objectively.
How NIR Works for Testing Meat Products
In NIR analysis, you direct light onto a sample and this light is modified depending on the sample’s composition. The NIR instrument converts this modified light into information about the sample.
The NIR method for obtaining information about the composition of meat products is known as reflectance. Here, the light reflects from the sample, and this indicates the sample’s absorbent properties.
NIR is especially effective in process control for meat products. Incorporating an in-line NIR analyser into processing lines supports accurate and clear monitoring of production lines.
Maintaining Quality and Safety in Meat
Accurate analysis and testing of meat products provides meaningful and actionable results.
For more information about our range of specialist meat testing instruments, please contact us.