Testing a Non-invasive Beef Tenderness Test

Background

Tenderness is one of the beef industry’s biggest quality challenges. Beef is costly, so customers are understandably annoyed when a high-priced steak is tough, or when the tenderness differs between two packages of the same cut and grade of beef.

A major obstacle to identifying tenderness is that measuring tenderness is a time consuming and costly process. Traditional methods of evaluating tenderness involve slicing, shearing, or chewing. These are destructive processes, so no value can be recovered after the beef has been tested. Genetic tests have been developed, but they aren’t always accurate and are too slow for routine sorting in packing plants. Efforts to provide consumers with consistently tender beef or identify superior genetics would benefit from a rapid, accurate, cost-effective method of measuring tenderness at line-speed.

“Rapid evaporative ion mass spectrometry” (REIMS) is a medical technology used tumor removal. Essentially, this technology is a “smart” scalpel that burns as it cuts. This procedure gives off gases which indicate what type of tissue is being cut. The scalpel analyzes these gases and tells the operator whether tumor cells are present (which means it’s cutting through the tumor) or not (cutting around the tumor).

The fact that this technology can identify biological tissue based on its chemical composition means that it may also be able to identify differences in tenderness, flavor and juiciness in meat. There is some evidence that it can identify tough vs. tender beef at least as accurately as other technologies. 

Objectives

• Evaluate the use of rapid evaporative ionization mass spectrometry (REIMS) for prediction of beef tenderness as assessed by slice-shear force analysis.
• Determine the capabilities of REIMS to assess collagen and proteolytic enzyme activity

What they Did

They collected 2” steaks from 1505 AA and 1363 AAA at Cargill plants in Alberta and Ontario over the course of three years. Samples were aged for 14 d, frozen, shipped to Texas, thawed, and tested with the REIMS technology. The steaks were then cooked, tested for slice shear force (tenderness), and separated into tough, intermediate and tender categories. Predicted (REIMS) and actual (shear force) results were compared. Subsamples were also sent to the University of Alberta for collagen analysis (beef with more collagen is tougher) and the University of Guelph to measure desmin, troponin-T and calpain (proteins and enzymes that are related to beef tenderness).

What They Learned

The results of this study indicate REIMS has the potential to identify differences in the metabolomic profiles of meat products. When coupled with machine learning algorithms, REIMS showed an ability to predict the most tender and toughest steaks with a relatively high degree of accuracy. Additionally, REIMS was able to predict quality grade with a high degree of accuracy. Furthermore, REIMS was able to identify the biochemical components of skeletal muscle that dictate meat tenderness with a moderate degree of accuracy. Future research with REIMS could focus on sampling more carcasses from an unknown population to fully understand the capabilities of the machine and to further optimize machine learning algorithms.

What This Means

In the near future REIMS could be utilized in a laboratory setting as a substitution for SSF. While REIMS would initially be more expensive than the equipment required for measuring mechanical shear force, it would eliminate the cooking step, less product would be lost for data acquisition, it is easy to use, and more samples could be processed at a time. The biggest limitation of the REIMS technology is the required cleaning of the mass spectrometry components, however, if this limitation was overcome, it could make REIMS a much more competitive technology in the determination of carcass tenderness.