An Updated Review of Meat Authenticity Methods and Applications

Abstract

Adulteration of foods is a serious economic problem concerning most foodstuffs, and in particular meat products. Since high-priced meat demand premium prices, producers of meat-based products might be tempted to blend these products with lower cost meat. Moreover, the labeled meat contents may not be met. Both types of adulteration are difficult to detect and lead to deterioration of product quality. For the consumer, it is of outmost importance to guarantee both authenticity and compliance with product labeling. The purpose of this article is to review the state of the art of meat authenticity with analytical and immunochemical methods with the focus on the issue of geographic origin and sensory characteristics. This review is also intended to provide an overview of the various currently applied statistical analyses (multivariate analysis (MAV), such as principal component analysis, discriminant analysis, cluster analysis, etc.) and their effectiveness for meat authenticity.

Discrimination of Meat Produced by Bos taurus and Bos indicus Finished under an Intensive or Extensive System

“…Further studies are needed to clarify how different finishing alternatives, in terms of diet composition and length of the finishing period [ 3 , 25 , 33 , 34 ], may affect the patterns identified here and how other chemical markers such as terpenes and carotenoids [ 35 ], as well as stable isotope ratios [ 14 , 36 ], may be used in discriminating finishing systems. On the other hand, the possible discrimination among meat from indicus or taurus cattle may be further enhanced by combining meat properties with the information provided by genetic markers that may enable breed assignment [ 37 , 38 , 39 ].…”

“…In spite of the significance of overall mean differences between quality traits of meats originating from different genetic groups or finishing systems, the variability among individual meat samples from the same group tends to be large, which may hinder the ability to reliably distinguish meat samples according to their genetic origin or production system. However, such distinction is essential if certification programs are adopted and appropriately verified [ 14 ], and various tools such as physical characteristics, chemical markers, genetic polymorphisms, etc., have been proposed for sample verification and assignment [ 15 ].…”

How meaty? Detection and quantification of adulterants, foreign proteins and food additives in meat products

“…The method developed in this study showed sensitivity and specificity in the quantification of pork meat in commercial processed meat products. Nowadays, to strengthen the above-described analytical methods, multivariate statistical techniques (chemometrics) are used and appear effective to determine meat authenticity as reviewed by Vlachos et al (2016). Chemometrics techniques (PCA, LDA, SIMCA, PLS-DA and PLS) can provide simple, rapid and low-cost methods for meat analysis, including the possibility of nondestructive measurements.…”

Applications of Mass Spectrometry to the Analysis of Adulterated Food

“…DNA-based technique with polymerase chain reaction [38,44] is a common technique in food authentication testing to ensure halal and kosher brand food products adhere to the standards. However, most of these techniques still require substantial sample preparation or some have very high sensitivity to adulterants and prone to give undefined results if all procedures are not followed exactly.…”