Measures of Tenderness

Tenderness

Measures of tenderness are used to quantify expected overall eating satisfaction of beef produced from a carcass. Beef that is more tender, or softer and easier to chew, is deemed to be more palatable by consumers.

Two tenderness testing protocols, Warner-Bratzler Shear Force and Slice Shear Force, are generally used in the beef industry today. Both are objective tests that adequately score beef and can be used for sorting the final product into levels of tenderness perceived by the consumer.