On-line methods for pork quality detection

The detection of pale, soft, exudative (PSE) and dry, firm, dark (DFD) meat is one of the most important problems in judging pork quality. The use of PSE meat leads to lower yields and changes in the rate of salt penetration in cured products, and is unsuitable for preparing cooked products while DFD meat has only a limited application in the preparation of cured products and is easily contaminated by microbial growth. For this reason it is important to be able to detect pork meat quality soon after slaughter and, to aid in this task, ‘on-line’ probes have been developed which are capable of rapidly categorizing meat. Most of these probes are based on the optical and electrical properties of muscle. The most interesting are those which measure internal light scattering by fibre optic probe (FOP) and electrical conductivity by quality meter (QM). Pork quality was studied using FOP, QM and pH measurement on the slaughter line in semimembranosus (SM) and longissimus dorsi (LD) muscles at 45 min and 24 h post-mortem. Results showed that pH is a good predictor of meat quality at 45 min and 24 h post-mortem while FOP differentiates between extreme categories and QM is better at detecting PSE meat.