Tender Beef, Tough Funding Cuts

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This article written by Dr. Reynold Bergen, BCRC Science Director, originally appeared in the May 2026 issue of Canadian Cattlemen magazine and is reprinted on BeefResearch.ca with permission of the publisher.

Ribeye or striploin steaks are almost always the costliest proteins in the store or on the menu, so it’s important that these high value cuts provide a predictable and excellent eating experience for the consumer, every time. Canada’s A, AA, AAA and Prime beef quality grades are based on marbling. Marbling score is a quick, easy and inexpensive way to estimate the amount of intramuscular fat within the ribeye muscle itself.

Generally, the more marbling there is, the juicier and more tender the steak will be. But a high marbling score alone can’t guarantee a great eating experience—a lot of other factors like protein structure characteristics and collagen content also influence beef tenderness. The problem is that directly measuring beef tenderness means sacrificing a steak so that it can be cooked and subjected to “shear force” measurements in the lab or fed to an expert taste panel. Those options are too costly, time-consuming and impractical to use in commercial practice.

A new option to evaluate beef tenderness may come from the world of cancer medicine. The “iKnife” uses a laser to cut out tumors. It resembles a wood burning kit connected to a long thin tube leading to an analytical device. As the iKnife cuts around a tumor, the “smoke” exhausts through the tube leading to a rapid evaporative ionization mass spectrometer (REIMS) that assesses what types of tissue are being cut through. If cancer cells are detected, the cut should be moved further out to make sure that the entire tumor is removed. This technology may also be able to analyze the exhaust gas to identify individual protein markers related to beef toughness or tenderness. The really good news is that iKnife technology is rapid, can be used on raw beef and only leaves small scorch marks on the steak—but the steak would still be completely edible afterwards.

A research team led by Jerrad Legako at Texas Tech University and the Universities of Guelph, Alberta and Ohio State collaborated with Cargill to assess whether REIMS technology can potentially evaluate steak tenderness at line speed (Evaluation of rapid evaporative ionization mass spectrometry (REIMS) for the prediction of slice shear force and quality grades in beef longissimus lumborum steaks and Evaluation of rapid evaporative ionization mass spectrometry (REIMS) relationships with biochemical markers of tenderness in beef longissimus lumborum steaks).

What They Did

The team collected 1,497 AA and 1,356 AAA striploin steaks from packing plants in Alberta and Ontario. Each steak was used for iKnife and REIMS testing (uncooked) and shear force tests (after cooking). Biochemical samples were collected from a subset of steaks before they were cooked.

What They Learned

Are AAA steaks more tender than AA steaks? Yes. Shear force testing found that the average AAA steak was more tender than the average AA steak. But there was a tremendous overlap between the two grades. Many AAA steaks were tougher than some AA steaks, and a lot of AA steaks were more tender than some AAA steaks. Marbling does not guarantee tenderness.

Can REIMS differentiate between tender and tough steaks? Yes. When the steaks were split into groups of “extremely tough,” “tough,” “average,” “tender” and “very tender” categories based on their shear force measurements, the REIMS results could accurately identify over 99% of the steaks that were in the “tough” and “extremely tough” categories.

What is REIMS measuring? Some of the metabolites detected in the exhaust gases are known to be strongly associated with beef tenderness. For example, sarcomere length is a measure of how contracted or flexed a muscle is. Shorter (more contracted) sarcomeres lead to tougher beef. Certain REIMS signals were strongly associated with sarcomere length. Other REIMS signals were associated with collagen (connective tissue) content that is related to toughness, and other signals were related to forms of muscle proteins that are released as meat ages and tenderizes. This suggests that the signals the REIMS technology measures are not random—they are reliably related to factors that are known to be linked with beef eating quality. This technology appears to be quite promising. Down the road, it may provide a way to incorporate a tenderness evaluation into Canada’s grading system.

The BCRC funded this research in the U.S. because REIMS technology was not available in Canada. The federal government’s recent closure of the Lacombe research facility created a major gap in beef quality and food safety research in Canada. With no active beef carcass research program remaining in Canada, we will have to rely on international research that may not be completely relevant to our system. Canada’s beef industry is working hard to save the expertise, equipment and data from the Lacombe facility and re-establish it at a Canadian university.

What Does This Mean To You?

Canada’s cattle producers and processors compete with imported beef in the Canadian market and with beef from other countries in export markets. Investing in research to continually improve the eating quality of Canadian beef supports consumer confidence and our industry’s international competitiveness.

Bottom Line

Finding ways to demonstrate that the eating quality of Canadian beef is predictably excellent strengthens our reputation with consumers here and around the world. Our industry depends on consumers’ continued willingness to buy beef. When they pay generously for a high-quality steak, they deserve to get one, and our industry can’t afford to disappoint them.

The Beef Cattle Research Council is a not-for-profit industry organization funded by the Canadian Beef Cattle Check-Off. The BCRC partners with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, provincial beef industry groups and governments to advance research and technology transfer supporting the Canadian beef industry’s vision to be recognized as a preferred supplier of healthy, high-quality beef, cattle, and genetics. Learn more about the BCRC at www.beefresearch.ca.

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