Identifying colored stale beef using diffuse reflectance Spectroscopy

Abstract

The 2013 horsemeat scandal in Europe aroused consumers’ interest in food fraud. Among various methods used for food fraud, adulteration has become serious a problem especially, the use of colorants in beef. Thus, our study tried to establish an advanced method for differentiating colored stale beef from fresh. We reproduced fresh beef color by using sodium nitrite, sodium ascorbate, food colorant Red no.40, and the natural colorant of squid ink to make stale beef look fresh. The RGB values of photos from colored stale beef and fresh beef showed a color similarity between colored stale beef and fresh beef. The proportion of myoglobin species was obtained by fitting diffuse reflectance spectra to a photon diffusion equation. Our last study proved that there was a significant difference in the proportion of myoglobin species between colored stale beef and fresh beef. In this study, we proved that colored stale beef can be identified as different from fresh beef by using diffuse reflectance spectroscopy, with the potential for commercialization soon.