Assessment of porcine meat quality at the slaughter line using raman spectroscopy

Fresh intact porcine semi-membranosus muscles (N=151) were measured between 30 and 60 min post mortem along the slaughter line of a commercial abattoir using a hand held device to determine the ability of Raman spectroscopy to predict meat quality. Technologically mportant quality traits such as pH35, pH24 and drip loss (DL) were measured using classical reference analysis and they were correlated with the Raman spectra using partial least squares regression. Predicting pH35, pH24and DL yielded a coefficient of determination of 0.75, 0.58 and 0.83 and a root mean square error of cross validation of 0.09 pH-units, 0.05 pH-units and 0.6 %, respectively. For the models, Raman signals of energy metabolites such as lactate, phosphate, ATP and phosphocreatine were weighted. This is the first Raman pectroscopic study to measure and predict quality traits in intact muscles along the slaughtering process showing the potential of early postmortem Raman spectra to measure pH35 and to predict pH24 and DL.