Canadian researchers have developed a Fourier transformed-infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy optimised protocol for analysing both qualitatively and quantitatively beef mince potentially adulterated with six types of beef and/or pork offal (beef tripe, beef liver, beef omasum, pork heart, pork kidney and pork liver). Two dimensional PCA (principal component analysis) chemometric analysis was applied to the authentic dataset of FT-IR spectra, but did not give sufficient discrimination. An optimised chemometric model based on LDA (linear discriminant analysis), PCA-DA, and PLS-DA (partial least squares-discriminant analysis) was found to give more accurate determination and low error rate for 3 classes of samples- beef, beef offal or pork offal. Once the offal is identified, a further chemometric analysis - PLSR (PLS regression) can be performed to determine accurately the amount of offal present.
Read the full paper at: FTIR Method for Offal in Beef Mince
