Quality characteristics of pork bellies with different fat content and their non-destructive prediction by imaging spectroscopy

ENG- Pork is one of the most popular meats worldwide and, in some countries, belly is considered a very important cut; however, it is one of the fattiest cuts. In order to satisfy consumer preferences for leaner products, producers have carried out intensive selection to reduce the fat content. This reduction has led to significant changes in the quality characteristics of pork belly, which are important for both producers and consumers. One of the objectives of the thesis was to investigate how quality characteristics change among a wide variety of pork bellies with different fat contents, both as whole pieces and sliced. In addition, pork producers are increasingly looking for more effective and non-destructive methods to determine the quality characteristics of pork belly to optimise production and marketing decisions. Non-destructive methods offer advantages such as speed, efficiency, and safety, allowing continuous quality assessment while ensuring product integrity and accuracy of results. Among these methods, those using different areas of the electromagnetic spectrum have gained attention. This thesis focuses on spectral imaging, which combines imaging and spectroscopy technologies to simultaneously obtain spatial and spectral information about the product. This system makes possible to characterise and identify complex heterogeneous matrices based on the unique spectrum captured for each pixel in the acquired images. Therefore, another objective of the thesis was to test spectral imaging technology for non-destructively predicting the quality characteristics of whole and sliced pork belly