Diode-Array Spectrometer for the meat industry

Together with Carl Zeiss MicroImaging, the company TQC has developed new analyzers for the meat and sausage industry:GROMA carne and CORONA, based on the proven diode spectrometers from Carl Zeiss. GROMA carne is highly suitable for process control thanks to its special design with a stainless steel housing, while the CORONA with TURNSTEP is suitable for laboratory use. In the past few years, meat and sausage companies have optimized their production by applying quality controls to incoming goods and final products. In particular, they extended their inspection of incoming goods to include additives and auxiliary agents. Tests performed by meat companies have shown that major variations of the raw materials used result in considerable sensory deviations of the final product. Both experts and laymen can recognize these taste differences. Detailed tests have also revealed that differing raw materials or inhomogeneous mixtures can result in wrong batches of spice mixtures. Therefore, spice manufacturers have integrated the relevant examinations into their incoming goods inspections. TQC and Carl Zeiss MicroImaging support the meat industry in these efforts. The newly developed GROMA carne system can analyze meat and sausages at-line in only 15 seconds Benefits of GROMA carne: Direct use in the factory Very easy sample preparation High sample throughput due to fast measurements in only 15 seconds Major reduction of measuring errors in inhomogeneous sample material Fully automatic operation Easy operation thanks to software specially tailored to production requirements Fast adaptation of calibration thanks to application of the PLS method. Neuronal networks are not required With GROMA and CORONA you can measure Raw meat: Water, fat, protein, Beffe Sausage meat: Water, fat, protein, Beffe, salt Finished products: Water, fat, protein, Beffe, salt and P2O5 for cooked salt meat Additional products: Water, calcium, color The method used by GROMA and CORONA is reflection measurement in the NIR range. GROMA contains a network card permitting scan and analysis data to be transferred to a server for evaluation. The TQC-Zeiss software interface specially tailored to production purposes (database and graphic software for materials identification) makes operation of the instrument very easy. The software for meat and sausage companies has the following features: Databases (chemical, microbiological and master data) Database management (data backup, reorganization, repair) Data input (manual input, data transfer from the TQC analyzer) Evaluations (single measurements, daily lists, selections) Miscellaneous (various settings and entries are possible here, e.g. company name, company location, saving location for data backup, etc.) The CORONA can also be used to measure spices. The spice analyzer allows information to be obtained about the measured product within a few seconds (< 30 sec. ).Using software especially developed for this purpose, the customer can directly chart scan data on a monitor and display the differences in quality or the deviations from a standard. As the system has a much greater wavelength and consequently measuring range compared to the meat analyzer, it is also possible to deduce information about the color, etc. An additional color measuring system is therefore no longer necessary.