RESEARCH REGARDING THE DEGRADATION OF MEAT SEMI – PRODUCTS AND THEIR CHEMICAL COMPOSITION

The trends in the meat market evolved in the last decade under the influence of consumers’ demands, economic restrictions, and food safety regulations. In this way, there are significant changes related to the quality of raw materials, products, and technologies. The present study tries to answer one of the new issues about the raw materials in meat processing. Due to the national and European regulations that lay down the meat raw material definition, some semi-products like Baader (unnerved meat) and MDM (mechanically deboned meat) are no longer accepted as ingredients in meat stuff. According to the definitions from the national regulation, these semi- products are auxiliary materials and in this way should be labelled accordingly. At the same time, meat from other semi-products like Parizer is allowed as an ingredient. Our study is investigated using advanced instruments the degree of meat physically degradation that is behind this changes in regulations - Imagistic equipment - Scanning electron microscope SEM VEGA3 SBU – Easy Probe produced by TESCAN, with EDX detector produced by BRUKER and Spectroscope- FT-NIR TANGO Spectrometer. The investigation recorded data about the chemical composition and imagistic data of the semi-products mentioned above. The data show similarities regarding the chemical composition and a similar degree of degradation.