Relationship between Color and Redox Potential (Eh) in Beef Meat Juice. Validation on Beef Meat

In France, around 3.5 million cattle are slaughtered each year, which represents 1.3 million tons of beef carcasses. However, waste due essentially to organoleptic defects is estimated at 3.4% of the production or 45,000 tons of beef carcasses. Microbiological contamination and color are the two major causes of defect. In order to prevent color defect, a study was performed to develop a new method for measuring rapidly and instantly the redox potential as an indicator of color changes in carcasses without slowing down the slaughter line. This measurement would allow to classify them upstream according to their time of colors changes in order to sort them and to avoid food waste in the future. Meat juice has been shown to be a good mimetic medium for the study of color changes. The effect of different parameters was studied in order to fix experimental conditions. Color change is faster in the juice than in the meat and faster at 20 °C than at 4 °C. Redox potential allows following color changes and a symmetry has been highlighted between this thermodynamic measure and color changes.