Non-destructive prediction of colour and water-related properties of frozen/thawed beef meat by Raman spectroscopy coupled multivariate calibration.

• Physical traits of frozen/thawed (F/T) beef were first predicted using Raman. • Raman is capable of predicting the thawing loss of F/T beef by CARS-PLS. • Raman based UVE-PLS is capable of predicting colour and water content of F/T beef. • T 21 water is contribute to the exudate loss during freeze–thaw. Freeze-thaw accelerated the colour deterioration of beef with the increase of colour b* and the decrease of colour a* values (P < 0.05). The maximum exudate loss reached 22 % after the seventh freeze–thaw. A strong correlation between the transversal relaxation time T 21 and thawing loss may mean that T 21 water contributed to the exudate loss during freeze–thaw. Afterwards, competitive adaptive reweighted sampling-partial least square (CARS-PLS) has the best prediction in thawing loss of frozen/thawed beef with correlation coefficients of prediction (R p) of 0.971, and root mean square error of prediction (RMSEP) of 1.436. Besides, Uninformative variable elimination-partial least squares (UVE-PLS) showed good prediction effects on colour values (R p = 0.932 – 0.994) and water content (R p = 0.928, RMSEP = 0.582) of frozen/thawed beef. Therefore, this work demonstrated that Raman spectroscopy coupled with multivariate calibration has a good ability for non-destructive prediction in colour and water-related properties of frozen/thawed beef. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]