Determination of soybean proteins in commercial heat-processed meat products prepared with chicken, beef or complex mixtures of meats from different species

The addition of foreign proteins (mainly soybean proteins and milk proteins) to heat-processed meat products is a common practice. This work approaches the determination of additions of soybean proteins in heat-processed meat products prepared with chicken meat, beef meat, and complex mixtures of meats from different species (chicken, pork, beef, and turkey) by perfusion reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography. The applied method was previously developed for the determination of soybean proteins in pork and turkey meat products but it has never been tested for the determination of soybean proteins in other heat-processed meat products containing other kinds of meats. This paper demonstrates the validity of this method for the detection of soybean proteins in heat-processed meat products containing different varieties of meats and even in the presence of other foreign proteins such as milk proteins. The specificity and existence of matrix interferences have been checked for these samples and accuracy has been evaluated by the comparison of the soybean protein contents determined by the proposed method and the official ELISA method.