Methods for Improving Meat Tenderness

The improvement of overall tenderness and the reduction in variability of tenderness was identified by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Carcass Quality Task Force as a high priority and a major issue facing the beef industry. The National Beef Tenderness Survey (Morgan et al., 1991) evaluated the overall tenderness of beef cuts in the retail meat case. Sources of variation in beef tenderness were identified as: 1) regional effects that could be contributed to either management differences among regions (prefeedlot management, days in the feedlot, feedlot management, level of nutrition, etc.) or breed type differences; 2) post-mortem conditions and handling practices; aging time varied from 3 to over 90 days post-fabrication with an overall mean postfabrication time of 17 days, this likely added to, not reduced, the variation in tenderness; 3) the shift from roasts to steaks and more single-muscle cuts as steaks from the same cut are tougher than roasts, most likely due to differences in cooking methods. From these results, a research program was initiated with the long term goal to identify critical control points from conception to consumer for beef tenderness and to subsequently identify methods of either controlling or monitoring critical control points. Ultimately, our goal is to test a system from conception to consumer to determine the efficacy of this approach. While much of this research is either on-going or in the planning stages, only the components that have been completed and that provide new information to the scientific literature will be presented. Critical Control Points For Meat Tenderness