Texas Tech University’s College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources has been granted $294,000 for new spectrometry technology to evaluate beef tenderness, flavor and juiciness.
The grant is funded by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture and will be conducted in conjunction with Colorado State University and the USDA Agricultural Research Service.
“We are very excited to collaborate on this effort aimed at discovering the potential of a very unique technology to differentiate the quality of beef products,” said project lead Dale Woerner, associate professor and Cargill Endowed Professor in Meat Science in the Department of Animal and Food Sciences, in the university newsletter Texas Tech Today.
“This technology, among others, is the future of differentiating quality and safety attributes of agricultural products intended for food,” he continued.
The project will utilize Rapid Evaporative Ionization Mass Spectrometry to identify compositional differences in beef.
The goal is to predict beef sensory performance to determine the exact peak of beef aging.
