The local meat industry could have a brighter future thanks to research on meat colouring by an Australian scientist.
Joanne Hughes, a muscle biochemist at CSIRO Food and Nutrition and her team, have been working on the use of high pressure processing technology (HPP) under low temperatures to lighten the colour of high-value primal meat cuts.
Dark meat, or dark cutting meat, is usually caused by undue stress on-farm or in transport and until now most methods for improving meat colour have focussed on pre-slaughter interventions.
Meat colour is the primary method consumers use to judge the quality of meat. Rather than bright red meat colours, dark meat not only looks a ‘less-fresh’ darker red or purple, it can also have a shorter shelf-life, variable tenderness and an off-flavour.
Failure to comply with colour criteria downgrades carcasses dramatically and results in lost value for producers, processors, and retailers.
Hughes said she surveyed a number of meat processors covering 43 per cent of the total cattle slaughtered, and found that dark meat could be costing the industry up to $500 million per year, or $1000 per animal - much more than previous estimates.
She believes that by adopting HPP technology in their plants, meat processors could reduce carcass downgrading, improve the quality and colour of the product before it reaches supermarket shelves, and maximise carcass value for both the producer and processor.
“Sometimes people in the industry tell me that HPP on fresh meat generates a “cooked- like” appearance, and meat goes brown in colour,” Hughes said.
“However, this is not the case when using lower temperatures and pressures like we will be. So, by using controlled conditions, we want to show that dark meat colours can be lightened with no adverse effects on eating quality,” Hughes said.
“By improving the value of primals, such as the loin, we can help processors achieve a higher value for each carcass, in turn hopefully providing a solution to the dark meat colour problem.
“Over the next five years, we aim to reduce this loss by 20 per cent and save the beef meat industry alone up to $100 million per year.”
Hughes was awarded for her work on dark meat this week in the red meat processing category of the Science and Innovation Awards for Young People in Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry.
The award is sponsored by the Australian Meat Processor Corporation and will provide the funding for Hughes’ project.
HPP machines can be expensive, but CSIRO says it has developed, in collaboration with Greenleaf Enterprises, a cost-benefit model to help processors determine the financial viability of adopting the technology.
