Comparison of the meat and carcass quality of lambs raised in organic or conventional production systems.

The ‘organic’ label on a product guarantees that synthetic fertilisers, pesticides and hormones are not used in the production process and that the use of pharmaceutical products and drugs is limited. However, product quality is often questioned and we have to anticipate the consumer demand for product quality guarantees. This study was conducted to compare the sensory and nutritional meat and carcass qualities of lambs raised under an organic (O) or a conventional (C) production system. Comparisons were made with both pasture-fed lambs and lambs that were stall-fed indoors with concentrate and hay. The experiment was conducted over two years for stall-fed lambs (S) (group O, n=24; group C, n=24) and three years for pasture-fed lambs (P) (group O, n=36; group C, n=36). For P lambs, O and C production systems differed in terms of the level of mineral N fertilisation of the pasture. For S lambs, the feed was organic vs. conventional, and the ingredients of O and C concentrates were the same. The nutritional quality of the meat (longissimus dorsi) was assessed in terms of its fatty acid (FA) composition, and the sensory quality of the loin chop was assessed by a trained sensory panel. In stall-fed lambs, the health value of meat FA for human consumption was higher in the O group than in the C group, but there was no difference in the sensory quality of the meat and the carcass between the O and C groups. In pasture-fed lambs, there were no significant differences between the O and C groups in terms of the health value of meat FA. However, in pasture-fed lambs, the loin chops had a higher level of abnormal odour of the fat in the organic than in the conventional group, probably due to a higher proportion of white clover in the diet

Use of twitter data for waste minimisation in beef supply chain

Approximately one third of the food produced is discarded or lost, which accounts for 1.3 billion tons per annum. The waste is being generated throughout the supply chain viz. farmers, wholesalers/processors, logistics, retailers and consumers. The majority of waste occurs at the interface of retailers and consumers. Many global retailers are making efforts to extract intelligence from customer’s complaints left at retail store to backtrack their supply chain to mitigate the waste. However, majority of the customers don’t leave the complaints in the store because of various reasons like inconvenience, lack of time, distance, ignorance etc. In current digital world, consumers are active on social media and express their sentiments, thoughts, and opinions about a particular product freely. For example, on an average, 45,000 tweets are tweeted daily related to beef products to express their likes and dislikes. These tweets are large in volume, scattered and unstructured in nature. In this study, twitter data is utilised to develop waste minimization strategies by backtracking the supply chain. The execution process of proposed framework is demonstrated for beef supply chain. The proposed model is generic enough and can be applied to other domains as well

Conservation de la viande fraiche de boeuf dans differents systemes d'emballage sous gaz carbonique avec ou sans oxygene residuel

International audienc

Influence of electrical stimulation and carcass chilling mode on lamb meat colour stability

International audienc