Electrical impedance probing of the muscle food anisotropy for meat ageing control

Muscle food undergoes structural modifications during postmortem ageing which affect its mechanical, electrical and dielectric properties, particularly the anisotropy of these properties. This study shows that rapid and non-invasive control methods based on measurement of electrical anisotropy of the meat could assess ageing state and be applied in a meat industry setting. We report the design and performances of two circular probes that proved good enough to carry out non-invasive on-line classification of bovine muscles according to ageing state. A strong correlation (R2 ≈ 0.70) was obtained between meat ageing state estimation by electrical impedance measurements and mechanical measurement achieved using the benchmark compression stress method. The aged muscles and the not aged muscles were sorted with a success rate close to 90%. Indeed, maturation measurement using these probes and method would make it possible to avoid unnecessary ageing of fast-maturing carcasses or muscles while at the same time, enabling better diversification between poorly aged products and fully aged products. This would open the way towards quality labels of meat tenderness.