Meat speciation by near infrared reflectance spectroscopy on dry extract

Professionals and consumers want to control the origin of meat, while producers can profit by mixing minced meat from low cost species into high value meat. Near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy on dry extracts was studied as a method for speciation of minced beef, pork, mutton and mechanically recovered poultry meat. This was divided into three levels: (1) classifying into “labelled species or not?”, (2) into one of four possible species or (3) predicting the degree of substitution of minced beef with other species in a model study. Minced meat from 68 carcasses from four animal species ranging from low to high fat contents were centrifuged. Extracted meat juices (0.5 mL) were dried on glass microfibre filters and the reflectance measured. Using the range 780–2500 nm and different methods of discriminant analysis by cross-validation, the 68 samples were classified 90–100% correctly according to speciation at levels 1) and 2). Level 3) included a Simplex design model study using 350 mixtures of the 68 centrifu...