Detection of minced beef adulteration with turkey meat by UV-vis, NIR and MIR spectroscopy

The aim of this work was to investigate the potential of UV-visible (UV-vis), near infrared (NIR) and mid infrared (MIR) spectroscopy, coupled with chemometric techniques, to detect minced beef adulteration with turkey meat. Besides 44 minced meat samples of pure bovine and 44 of pure turkey, 154 mixtures of minced beef adulterated with turkey meat in the range 5-50% (w/w) were prepared and analyzed. The spectral data, standardized by different pre-treatments, were processed, separately or fused, using Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), and Partial Least Squares (PLS) regression. Moreover, a variable selection method was performed before classification and regression analysis. Among the three spectroscopic techniques, comparing the PLS models in terms of errors in prediction (RMSEP), the best results were obtained with NIR and MIR spectroscopy, whereas the UV-vis results were less satisfactory. Finally, combining information from UV-vis, NIR and MIR spectroscopy improved the overall results.