Bone blackening : what are the risk factors ?

The increased shelf-life of case-ready pork ribs saleable to the public has repercussions on the taste-texture quality of the meat end-product. Although meat colour is preserved, bone blackening has triggered a slump in sales. Jury-led visual assessments on meat cases confirmed that the meat preserves well in the case packing. However, bone blackening has a strongly negatively effect on purchases made after 8 days of storage. Pairwise process comparisons demonstrated that an intense chill released during case-hardening promotes the development of blackened bone, whereas the process steps involved in slaughter (carcass split and chiller type) had no significant impact. Similarly, cross-comparison of vacuum-packing vs film-packing was unable to conclusively identity any affect of packaging method. However, fogging the bones with ascorbic acid is able to delay the blackening process. After treatment, the bone blackening factor no longer limits sales of case-ready meat, as 99% of cases still get sold at the use-by date.