Fresh, Premium, Natural, Young. Choosing the best turkey this Thanksgiving can be a daunting task. In this year’s Thanksgiving Spectroscopy Special our new ChemWiz-ADK Handheld NIR spectrometer is put to the test and analyzes turkey for moisture and authenticity. Watch the full DEMO in our new StellarLAB and get a quote while we have NIR spectrometers in stock!
Happy Thanksgiving from the StellarNet Team!
Are you ready to gobble ‘till you wobble? Have you already started your shopping? What’s on your menu this year? It can be a daunting task to pick the perfect turkey for your holiday feast. You walk into your local grocery store and see turkeys stacked in piles with all different labels and names.
If you see a turkey with a “Young” label you might assume that it means that the bird was killed while it was younger so that must mean it will be more tender and tasty. Unfortunately, this label doesn’t mean much. Most commercial turkeys are slaughtered between 16 and 18 weeks. If a turkey has lived longer than a year, it is then labeled as “mature” or as a “yearling” – so really the “young” label just means it’s a typical turkey
One of the most interesting labels you can find on these birds is “Fresh.” You like to hope that your grocery store is only selling fresh meats and vegetables. Does “Fresh” on the label mean that the turkey is freshly slaughtered for your enjoyment? Not exactly. In this case, “Fresh” means that it has not been cooled below 26 degrees F – so it’s never been frozen. At temperatures above 26 degrees F, the meat can remain pliant (you can press it in with your thumb). This got the StellarNet team thinking – does freezing your bird have anything to do with how tender and juicy it will turn out? Well, of course, it does – the act of freezing meat causes cellular damage and the thawing process releases vitamins and salts from within the meat drying it out.
The ChemWiz-ADK Handheld NIR Spectrometer is a rugged and easy-to-use, research-grade near-infrared spectrometer for lab and field testing of sample composition with no additional setup required. The built-in Analyzer Development Kit allows for spectral matching and also user creatable PLS modeling and prediction functionality. Additionally, the ChemWiz-ADK comes pre-packed with starter NIR calibration models for a variety of applications.
Turkey Test for Authenticity using Handheld NIR
For this year’s Thanksgiving Spectroscopy Special we put the ChemWiz-ADK handheld NIR spectrometer to the test and first analyzed faux turkey with the real thing. In this experiment, we used the built-in Spectral ID matching module of ChemWiz-ADK’s app-based software. The Spectral-ID module allows users to save NIR spectra of any sample and then search their created database. We used Tofurkey, a well-known brand of soy turkey deliciousness, and compared it directly with turkey. Spectral matching of compositionally different samples is a very simple task for the handheld spectrometer as you can see from the match listed screenshots below.
Turkey Test for Moisture using Handheld NIR
Next, we created a basic Partial Least Squares (PLS) Chemometrics model using the ChemWiz-ADK model builder module. We used turkey samples with varying moisture content as standards. Each sample’s NIR spectrum was taken and saved along with its moisture value as a percentage. We rotated and recorded each sample in triplicate to strengthen the model. From the graph below you can see the actual vs. predicted model statistics which are displayed from within the application. R squared values of >95% were collected and we used this model for sample prediction. Unknown samples #1 and #2 below measured 10% and 30% respectively. The ChemWiz-ADK handheld NIR spectrometer is easy-to-use and versatile for everyday applications. You don’t have to be a chemometrician or a spectroscopist to use the instrument. Model settings such as pre-processing, smoothing, and averaging are all preconfigured for immediate analysis and can be modified for more advanced control.
