As with all foodstuffs for human consumption, meat is highly regulated. Determining its makeup is essential to confirming a safe product. The faster regulatory analyses can be performed, the quicker you can confirm the quality of your product and maintain production speed.
Determining the moisture content of meat is one such analysis that helps identify the quality and safety of the meat in question. Moisture content can control the texture, taste, and microbial stability of the meat. It also determines the level of retained water, additive solutions for flavoring, and the leanness of meat.
The TGM800 is an automated thermogravimetric moisture analyzer that already speeds up the analysis of moisture content. Depending on sample size, up to 16 samples can be analyzed simultaneously with minimal sample prep work, reducing labor requirements and the chances for human error. Using the TGM800, ten 6.5 g meat samples can be analyzed in just 4.5 hours.
However, the speed boost of the TGM800 can be increased again with the addition of quartz drying sand. Though this adds some prep time back into the mix and reduces the number of simultaneous samples (as one sample crucible needs to be dedicated to pure quartz sand for reference purposes), nine 6.5 g meat samples mixed with 3.0 g of quartz sand were able to be analyzed in just 2.5 hours. Fifteen smaller sample sizes of 1.0 g took only 3 hours to analyze without the aid of quartz sand and 1.5 hours with quartz sand.
For more details on how this method works and the results obtained with the TGM800, check out our application note.
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