Consumer's perception of beef tenderness

Beef tenderness evaluation is usually performed by instrumental methods and/or by sensory analysis, using a trained panel, but it is as much as useful to know consumer linking of this important and also very variable characteristic of the product. Therefore a study was conducted to determine consumer ability to recognize differences in beef tenderness. For this purpose a panel of 220 consumers, differing for sex and age and recruited from a broad range of socioeconomic background was employed. Tenderness evaluation was carried out on samples of longissimus thoracis (8th – 10th thoracic vertebra) purchased at retail and taken from the right side of 31 carcasses belonged to the most widespread commercial categories in Piedmont, i. e. milkfed calves (n. = 10) and young bulls of dairy (n. =10) and beef (n. = 11) breeds. The samples were transferred to the laboratory of Animal Science of Turin, divided in two further samples, vacuum packaged, frozen and stored at -25°C until of their utilization. The meat was cooked by roasting in an electric convection oven to an internal temperature of 70°C. Each panelist, involved in only one session, evaluated, in general, three meat samples (1.3 x 1.3 x 1.9 cm) using a five point facial hedonic scale. The scale was: 1 = “very tough”; 2 = “tough”; 3 = “neither tough nor tender”; 4 = “tender”; 5 = “very tender”. A total of 671 evaluations were obtained. The correspondence analysis was employed to study sensory judgements distribution in relation either the sex and age of the consumes or the category of the animals. The results of this study show that the beef tenderness evaluation was not affected by consumer sex and age. On the contrary, highly significant differences in tenderness rating distribution were found according to the commercial categories of the animals. Indeed the meat of calves obtained scores higher (P < 0.001) than meat of dairy and beef young bulls. In particular 45% “tender” and 55% “very tender” meat belonged to calves. Meat from dairy and beef breeds did not differ in tenderness scores (P = 0.31). It is however to pointed out that meat of dairy breed represented more than 50% “very tough” tenderness ratings, whereas that of young bulls of beef breed had an higher percentage in “very tender” ratings (28% vs 16%). In conclusion, the results show that, apart from sex and age, the consumers are able to consistently detect beef tenderness differences. The large distribution of the meats of each commmercial category of the animals in the tenderness ratings indicate that the meat sold at retail shows high variability. Consequently it is important for beef industry to promote the tender meat production.