Comparing different instruments for measuring fat content in ground meat

Abstract

Knowledge of the fat content in the meat is extremely important subject for the food production industry. Food production’s companies like (STABBURET) can save big amount of money by determine some quality attributes. Several fast and nondestructive instrumental methods have been reported, such as use of X-ray, ultraviolet energy, fluorescence, visual light, Raman scatter, infrared energy, radio waves and few moor. The first part of this thesis shall discuss the multivariate statistic and the calibration methods. I obtained two data sets from NOFIMA. These data sets is taken from the NIR instrument Q-vision 500. In this part I shall try to learn some important principles in modern calibration methods such as PCA, PCR and PLS. In the second part of this thesis we will emphasis on some methods that have been used by STABBURET, AASHEIM KJØTT, ANIMALIA and EUROFINS. These methods are either x-ray, chemical or Near Infrared Spectroscopic (NIR). One problem with all methods is that we do not get the true value of the fat content, but a prediction depends on some reference methods. This is the reason we have different results from different instruments. The background for our study is that STABBURET has observed some differences in the fat measurements from their instruments (FA DEXA, BUCHI and NIR INRAALYZER) with the fat content value they get from AASHEIM KJØTT. The people in STABBURET confirmed that those differences are always over the measurements from AASHEIM KJØTT. That means, if AASHEIM KJØTT deliver a batch of 800-1000kg grading meat from the category 21% fat content, the people from the laboratory will find that the fat content is 23% or more. In this way STABBURET pay for one fat category, but they get meat with higher fat content. The most important conclusion in my opinion is that the reference instrument (FOODSCAN) at ANIMALIA is closer to the FA DEXA at STABBURET than Q-monitor at AASHEIM KJØTT. The results from the first and second data collection show that Q-monitor provides results with lower fat content than the other instruments. A new recalibration for Q-monitor according to the results from these two data collection, could improve the performance of this instrument.