Preventing animal-source food waste is an important pathway to reducing malnutrition and improving food system sustainability. Uncontrolled color variation due to oxidation is a source of waste as it prompts food rejection by consumers. Evaluation of oxidation–reduction potential (ORP) can help to predict and prevent oxidation and undesirable color changes. A new sensor and two modeling approaches—a phenomenological model and a reaction–diffusion model—were successfully used to predict the oxidative browning of beef ribeye steaks stored under different temperature and oxygen concentration conditions. Both models predicted similar storage durations for acceptable color, although deviating for higher and lower redness levels, which are of no interest for meat acceptance. Simulations under higher oxygen concentrations lead to a few days of delay in the redness change, as observed in practice, under modified atmosphere packaging. In meat juice, variation in ORP measured by the sensor correlated with the redness variation. However, in meat, sensors promote oxidation in the adjacent area, which is unacceptable for industrial use. This paper discusses the potential, limits, and prospects of the mathematical models and sensors, developed for beef. A strategy is proposed to couple these approaches and include the effect of microorganisms.

In France, around 3.5 million cattle are slaughtered each year, which represents 1.3 million tons of beef carcasses. However, waste due essentially to organoleptic defects is estimated at 3.4% of the production or 45,000 tons of beef carcasses. Microbiological contamination and color are the two major causes of defect. In order to prevent color defect, a study was performed to develop a new method for measuring rapidly and instantly the redox potential as an indicator of color changes in carcasses without slowing down the slaughter line. This measurement would allow to classify them upstream according to their time of colors changes in order to sort them and to avoid food waste in the future. Meat juice has been shown to be a good mimetic medium for the study of color changes. The effect of different parameters was studied in order to fix experimental conditions. Color change is faster in the juice than in the meat and faster at 20 °C than at 4 °C. Redox potential allows following color changes and a symmetry has been highlighted between this thermodynamic measure and color changes.