Raman spectrometry has the potential to become a rapid online screening tool for pork producers to quickly select pigs whose pork is of superior quality for the breeding herd.
On the other hand, they can cull those whose pork is of poor quality.
Researchers from Iowa State University, Jiangxi Agricultural University and Dalian Polytechnic University in China, and the United States Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service tested a portable Raman spectrometer to predict fresh pork tenderness and slice shear force and report their findings in Meat Science, an online research journal.
Sensory quality classification models of "poor" and "good" were developed to predict tenderness.
Various quality categories were found to be more accurate for the day 15 postmortem samples for sensory tenderness (93.5 percent vs. 76.3 percent) and SSF (92.8 percent vs. 76.1 percent).
